A path to the bilingual advantage: Pairwise matching of individuals

Czapka, Sophia; Wotschack, Christiane; Klassert, Annegret; Festman, Julia

doi:10.1017/s1366728919000166

Cited by 16 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…2004; Ardila et al, 2005;Hughes and Ensor, 2005;Noble et al, 2005), gender (Huster et al, 2011), L1 lexical level and nonverbal reasoning (Morton and Harper, 2007;Li and Xie, 2017;Czapka et al, 2020), sport, music, or video game practice (for a review, see Diamond, 2012).Only the study of Barbu et al (2019) controlled for the video game, sport, and music practice of the children in addition to the factors that were often, but not always, controlled in the other studies (SES, gender, time spent in CLIL, L1 lexical level and non-verbal reasoning). Therefore, if we obtain a cognitive advantage in immersed children, we could not attribute it to any known confounding factors.…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploration of Attentional and Executive Abilities in French-Speaking Children Immersed in Dutch Since 1, 2, 3, and 6 Years

2020

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Advantages in diverse aspects of cognitive functioning have been reported in early bilinguals (Bialystok, 2011) as well as in children frequenting an early bilingual immersion school program (Nicolay and Poncelet, 2015). However, during the last decade, some studies failed to replicate these advantages. Currently, the presence of cognitive benefits in children frequenting an immersion program remains debated. The lack of consistency between the studies could come from the fact that time spent by children within the immersion program is variable from one study to the other and that studies used different tasks to assess the same cognitive function. The main aim of the present study was to determine how time spent in immersion affects the emergence of cognitive advantages along the primary schooling. We compared 196 immersed Dutch-speaking children since they were 5 years old and 195 non-immersed French-speaking children, from different grades of the primary schooling (i.e., at 6, 7, 8, and 12 years old) by using the same attentional and executive tasks as those used in previous studies having shown a bilingual advantage. Furthermore, these groups were matched on a set of variables known to influence cognitive functioning. After 1, 2, and 3 years of enrolment in this program, performances of immersed compared to non-immersed children did not differ for any task. However, after 6 years, immersed children outperformed non-immersed children on the cognitive flexibility and the working memory tasks. These results show that, in French-speaking children immersed in Dutch, cognitive advantages could depend on the length of time spent in immersion since they are not present at the beginning (after 1, 2, and 3 years) but seem to emerge at the end of it (after 6 years). In contrast, in previous studies conducted in English immersion, advantages appear at the beginning of the primary schooling but are absent at the end of it. Furthermore, these results suggest that the emergence of cognitive advantages may vary depending on the second language learned. The results are discussed in terms of linguistic characteristics and status of the languages at stake.

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Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploration of Attentional and Executive Abilities in French-Speaking Children Immersed in Dutch Since 1, 2, 3, and 6 Years

2020

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“…Table 5 demonstrates that as with the infant and preschool groups, EF was the most frequently measured ability with school-age participants, with all 21 experiments measuring some component(s) of EF (Antón, Duñabeitia, Estévez, Hernández, Castillo, Fuentes, et al, 2014;Bialystok & Viswanathan, 2009;Bosma, Hoekstra, Versloot, Arjen, & Blom, 2017;Cockcroft, 2016;Crespo et al, 2019;Czapka et al, 2020;de Abreu, 2011;de Abreu, Cruz-Santos, Tourinho, Martin, & Bialystok, 2012;Kapa & Colombo, 2013;Ladas, Carroll, & Vivas, 2015;Morales, Calvo, & Bialystok, 2013;Park, Ellis Weismer, & Kaushanskaya, 2018;Pino Escobar, Kalashnikova, & Escudero, 2018;Poarch & van Hell, 2012;Poarch & Bialystok, 2015;Struys, Duyck, & Woumans, 2018;Tse & Altarriba, 2014;Vivas, Chrysochoou, Ladas, & Salvari, 2020). Attention was measured in 10 experiments using the ANT (attentional control: Antón et al, 2014;Kapa & Colombo, 2013;Ladas et al, 2015 Bosma et al, 2017;de Abreu et al, 2012).…”

Section: Target Cognitive Abilities and Cognitive Tasks Usedmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Table 6 shows that inhibition was assessed in 11 experiments using the DCCS ('inhibitory control', Crespo et al, 2019;Pino Escobar et al, 2018), Stroop task (Pino Escobar et al, 2018, Flanker task (Park et al, 2018;Poarch & Bialystok, 2015;'cognitive control', Struys BILINGUAL CHILDHOOD COGNITIVE MEASURES 24 et al, 2018), the Bivalent Shape task (BST, 'interference inhibition', Czapka et al, 2020), the Go/No-Go task ('response inhibition', Czapka et al, 2020), Simon and Simon-like tasks (Morales et al, 2013, Study 1, 'Pictures task';Struys et al, 2018), the Frog Matrices task (Morales et al, 2013, Study 2), the Flanker task ('interference suppression': Bosma et al, 2017;de Abreu et al, 2012), the ANT ('resistance to interference', Vivas et al, 2020), and the 'Faces task' ('inhibitory control and response suppression', Bialystok & Viswanathan, 2009). Shifting was assessed in four experiments, using the 'Faces task' ('switching ability', Bialystok & Viswanathan, 2009), DCCS (Crespo et al, 2019;Park et al, 2018), and the Simon Switching task ('task switching', Tse & Altarriba, 2014).…”

Section: Target Cognitive Abilities and Cognitive Tasks Usedmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Working memory was assessed in nine experiments (Bosma et al, 2017;Cockcroft, 2016;Czapka et al, 2020;de Abreu, 2011;de Abreu et al, 2012;Morales et al, 2013, Study 1 & 2;Park et al, 2018;Tse & Altarriba, 2014). Three experiments measured verbal WM using Counting Recall, Forward and Backward Digit Recall, and Non-Word Repetition tasks (Bosma et al, 2017;Cockcroft, 2016;de Abreu, 2011).…”

Section: Target Cognitive Abilities and Cognitive Tasks Usedmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Measures of bilingual cognition – from infancy to adolescence

Williams¹,

Parthasarathy²,

Molnár³

2021

Preprint

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An extensive literature exists regarding the effect of bilingualism on cognition in developing populations. However, the term ‘cognition’ is vague and applies to a large number of different abilities. We reviewed 57 publications examining cognition in simultaneous bilingual children to understand what aspects of cognition have been studied in this population and what tasks have been used, in addition to qualitatively assessing the results of bilingual/monolingual comparisons. Executive function was the most frequently assessed cognitive ability across all age groups, paralleling the adult bilingual literature, with memory flexibility and theory of mind also emerging as common targets within infant and preschool age groups. Results are discussed in light of developmental trajectories and assessment methodologies currently available for the cognitive abilities represented in this literature.

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“…To test the robustness of the effects in analyses where all participants were closely matched (Czapka et al, 2020), we carried out a second series of analyses in which informants from all three groups were matched on all variables listed in Table 2, including the ones used as covariates in the first series of analyses. The only variable for which the two bilingual groups could not be matched is self-reported language mixing.…”

Section: Group Differences In Efs Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

Explaining Individual Differences in Executive Functions Performance in Multilinguals: The Impact of Code-Switching and Alternating Between Multicultural Identity Styles

et al. 2020

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This study sheds new light on the relative impact of switching between languages and switching between cultures on Executive Functions (EFs) in bilinguals. Several studies have suggested that bilingualism has a measurable impact on executive functioning, presumably due to bilinguals' constant practice in dealing with two languages, or two cultures. Yet, the evidence on the relative contribution of culture and bilingualism to EFs is not well understood, because disentangling language, culture and immigration status is very difficult. The novelty of our approach was to keep the language pair and immigration status constant, whilst the cultural identity of participants was systematically varied, and measured at the individual level (not just at group level). Two groups of Turkish-English bilinguals, all adult immigrants to the United Kingdom, took part in the study, but one group (n = 29) originated from mainland Turkey and the other (n = 28) from Cyprus. We found that the bilinguals experienced smaller Conflict Effects on a Flanker task measuring inhibition, by comparison with monolingual British participants (n = 30). The key variable explaining EF performance variance at the individual level turned out to be bilinguals' Multicultural Identity Style. In particular those who indicated that they attempted to alternate between different British and Turkish (Cypriot) identity styles were found to have shorter RTs on incongruent trials of the Flanker task. The two multicultural identity variables, Alternating and Hybrid Identity Styles, together explained 32% in RTs over and above Education, Working Memory and Nonverbal reasoning (overall explained variance 49%). Thus, the data provide strong evidence for the impact of culture on EFs. We suggest that, as a result of their daily practice in recognizing cultural cues which highlight the need to switch to a different cultural frame, multicultural bilinguals develop a heightened context-sensitivity, and this gives them an advantage over monolinguals in a Flankers task. Our approach, which draws on models from cross-cultural psychology, bilingualism and executive functioning, illustrates the importance of theory building in which sociolinguistic and cultural variables are integrated into models of EFs.

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A path to the bilingual advantage: Pairwise matching of individuals

Cited by 16 publications

References 57 publications

Exploration of Attentional and Executive Abilities in French-Speaking Children Immersed in Dutch Since 1, 2, 3, and 6 Years

Exploration of Attentional and Executive Abilities in French-Speaking Children Immersed in Dutch Since 1, 2, 3, and 6 Years

Measures of bilingual cognition – from infancy to adolescence

Explaining Individual Differences in Executive Functions Performance in Multilinguals: The Impact of Code-Switching and Alternating Between Multicultural Identity Styles

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