Early bilingualism enhances mechanisms of false‐belief reasoning

Abstract

In their first years, children's understanding of mental states seems to improve dramatically, but the mechanisms underlying these changes are still unclear. Such 'theory of mind' (ToM) abilities may arise during development, or have an innate basis, developmental changes reflecting limitations of other abilities involved in ToM tasks (e.g. inhibition). Special circumstances such as early bilingualism may enhance ToM development or other capacities required by ToM tasks. Here we compare 3-year-old bilinguals and monolinguals on a standard ToM task, a modified ToM task and a control task involving physical reasoning. The modified ToM task mimicked a language-switch situation that bilinguals often encounter and that could influence their ToM abilities. If such experience contributes to an early consolidation of ToM in bilinguals, they should be selectively enhanced in the modified task. In contrast, if bilinguals have an advantage due to better executive inhibitory abilities involved in ToM tasks, they should outperform monolinguals on both ToM tasks, inhibitory demands being similar. Bilingual children showed an advantage on the two ToM tasks but not on the control task. The precocious success of bilinguals may be associated with their well-developed control functions formed during monitoring and selecting languages.

The adolescent mind in school: theory of mind and self-concept in Canadian and Polish youth

“…Furthermore, the general language competence and working memory of all participants may have influenced the results and would be useful to include in a future study. For example, according to previous research (Bialystok, 1999;Kovacs, 2009), ToM should be explored in various cultural contexts in which children speak more than one language because the ability to speak more thank one language may influence ToM performance directly and indirectly (via better executive function in bi-and multilinguals).…”

Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants

“…In fact, cognitive control or executive functions (EF) refer to mechanisms involved in conflict monitoring, planning, attentional control, and the suppression (inhibition) of habitual responses (13,14). Previous research has shown that the habitual use of 2 languages leads to improved cognitive control in young and older adults and in preschool and school-aged children (15)(16)(17)(18). This improvement is generally attributed to the need of bilinguals to inhibit one language while switching to the other language in production (12,19).…”

Why are bilinguals better than monolinguals at false-belief tasks?

“…Theory of Mind studies have revealed that 3-year-old bilinguals outperform monolingual children of the same age in standard FB tasks (Goetz, 2003;Berguno & Bowler, 2004;Kovács, 2009Kovács, , 2012Nguyen & Astington, 2014;Gordon, 2016; see also Bialystok & Senman, 2004;Greenberg et al, 2013), and parallel results have been reported with bilingual adults (Rubio-Fernández & Glucksberg, 2012). These studies discuss a number of experiential factors that could boost bilinguals' understanding of false belief, such as having greater metalinguistic awareness (e.g.…”

“…In contrast, according to competence accounts, the bilingual experience should give bilingual children an advantage in the modified FB task (which was set up in the kind of language-switch scenario that bilingual children regularly experience) but not in the standard FB task. As predicted by the performance accounts, the 3-year-old bilinguals in Kovács (2009) outperformed their monolingual peers in both types of task.…”

“…However, it must be noted that the experimental record has not disconfirmed the alternative hypothesis that bilingual children may have a better understanding of other people's perspectives, independently from their enhanced EF. Kovács (2009) tested the competence versus performance accounts of Theory of Mind development in a FB study with monolingual and bilingual children. For this purpose, she used a standard change-of-location task and a modified FB task that was set up in a language-switch scenario.…”