Working memory in multilingual children: Is there a bilingual effect?

Abstract

This research investigates whether early childhood bilingualism affects working memory performance in 6-to 8-year-olds, followed over a longitudinal period of three years. The study tests the hypothesis that bilinguals might exhibit more efficient working memory abilities than monolinguals, potentially via the opportunity a bilingual environment provides to train cognitive control by combating interference and intrusions from the non-target language. Forty-four bilingual and monolingual children, matched on age, sex, and socioeconomic status, completed assessments of working memory (simple span and complex span tasks), fluid intelligence, and language (vocabulary and syntax). The data showed that the monolinguals performed significantly better on the language measures across the years whereas no language group effect emerged on the working memory and fluid intelligence tasks after verbal abilities were considered. The study suggests that the need to manage several language systems in the bilingual mind affects children's language skills whilst having little impact on the development of working memory abilities.

A Quasi-Universal Nonword Repetition Task as a Diagnostic Tool for Bilingual Children Learning Dutch as a Second Language

“…The bilingual children were presumably disadvantaged on the L-S NWRT due to having less language-specific knowledge of Dutch to support memory representations needed to successfully repeat items from the L-S NWRT. This finding is consistent with previous work (Engel de Abreu et al, 2013;Engel de Abreu, 2011;Kohnert et al, 2006) and is also apparent in the scores on the language tests (see Table 2), which are substantially lower for the bilingual TD children than for their monolingual TD peers. Knowledge of Dutch did not appear to be as important for the Q-U NWRT as the two TD groups performed similarly.…”

“…Their study also included a group of monolingual children with LI and the diagnostic power of the measure was not sufficient to separate the bilingual TD children from the children with LI. Second, Engel de Abreu (2011) found no differences between monolingual and bilingual TD children on working memory tasks, but did find group effects on the NWRT with higher scores in the monolingual group. The effect disappeared when vocabulary was controlled which suggests that performance on a NWRT relies on language-specific lexical knowledge.…”

Enhancing the learning of new words using an errorless learning procedure: Evidence from typical adults

“…Our findings are consistent with those reported by Morales et al (2013) and , but differ from those reported by Engel de Abreu and colleagues (Engel de Abreu, 2011;Engel de Abreu et al, 2012). We are confident that the differences between our findings and those reported by Engel de Abreu are not down to task differences as we used the same tasks from the AWMA as Engel de Abreu.…”

Recovery of Working Memory Following Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury: A Longitudinal Analysis

“…This is noteworthy, given that some studies have shown that bilingualism confers an advantage on working memory tasks (Sorge, Toplak, & Bialystok, 2017; Veenstra et al, 2016). However, the relationship between bilingualism and better working memory performance has not been consistently demonstrated (Engel De Abreu, 2011; Gathercole et al, 2014; Loe & Feldman, 2016). …”