Does long-term dual-language immersion affect children’s executive functioning?

A Novel Dual-Language Touch-Screen Intervention to Slow Down Cognitive Decline in Older Adults: A Randomized Controlled Trial

“…It is possible that our training duration may have been too short to induce improvements in nonverbal cognitive abilities. Studies on children have shown that while DL education is associated with better verbal working memory and verbal learning skills than SL education in children in Kindergarten to 2nd Grade ( Kaushanskaya et al, 2014 ), its benefits on nonverbal executive abilities (e.g., inhibition and switching) only emerged in 2nd Grade and 4th Grade ( Esposito & Baker-Ward, 2013 ; Neveu et al, 2021 ). As our study only lasted for 2–3 months, the limited intervention duration could explain the absence of DL cognitive training-related improvement in nonverbal cognitive abilities.…”

“…Indeed, studies found that young bilinguals who are more exposed to the DL context have better cognitive flexibility (as indexed by smaller switching cost and mixing cost in a task-switching task) than those who are more exposed to the SL context ( Hartanto & Yang, 2016 ; Khodos & Moskovsky, 2021 ). Educational programs that support a DL approach, where elementary school children spend a certain ratio of their school time learning school subjects (e.g., Mathematics, and Science) in a foreign language and the rest of the time in their native language, also found that students in DL program performed better on their academic subjects, verbal working memory, verbal learning, and inhibition than their SL counterparts (e.g., Esposito & Baker-Ward, 2013 ; Kaushanskaya et al, 2014 ; Neveu et al, 2021 ; Park et al, 2023 ). A recent study of bilingual older adults by Chan et al (2020) in Singapore revealed that active bilingualism, indicated by more balanced bilingual usage, was associated with better performance in goal maintenance in older adults.…”

Second language learning at school enhances Theory of Mind skills

“…Most studies on cognitive and socio-cognitive advantages in bilingual children have focused on children who have acquired both languages at home or who have been immersed into an L2 at preschool or school. Both full immersion into an L2 and partial immersion into a bilingual school has been found to lead to improved EF performance in terms of working memory (Gillet, Barbu, & Poncelet, 2020;Hansen et al, 2016;Purić, Vuksanović, & Chondrogianni, 2017), cognitive exibility (Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008;Christoffels, de Haan, Steenbergen, van den Wildenberg, & Colzato, 2015;Kalia, Daneri, & Wilbourn, 2019) as well as inhibitory and attentional control (Neveu, Crespo, Ellis Weismer, & Kaushanskaya, 2021;Nicolay & Poncelet, 2015;Yang, Yang, & Lust, 2011). Similarly, growing up with a minority language and the subsequent full immersion into the majority language at school has been found to accelerate ToM development in relation to monolingual control groups, with advanced understanding of mental representations (Berguno & Bowler, 2004) and advanced ToM (Goetz, 2003).…”

The role of technology in language immersion: a systematic literature review

“…It is proven in the research [22], learners who follow language immersion programs come through communication apprehensions in four communication contexts, group discussions, meetings, conversations, and public speaking, which in turn may bring negative impact on learners' performance, participation, course grades, cognitive processing, and motivation. From the other psychological aspect, there is no benefit explicitly seen from language immersion participants in the Stroop task [23] and executive functions [24]. In addition, double demand in paying attention to language and content in language immersion is often resolved by favoring the content.…”