Children who are raised bilingual develop language and cognitive skills differently, according to a new study carried out at York University in Toronto. The study showed that different factors are responsible for the language- and non-language-related outcomes of bilingualism seen in previous research.
While children who grow up speaking two languages have slower language acquisition in both languages than a monolingual child, the bilingual child has better metalinguistic development giving the child a deeper understanding of language structure, an important skill for literacy. In addition, bilingual children perform better on tests that measure a child’s ability to focus attention where necessary without being distracted and to shift attention when required.
To determine what factors can be associated with being raised speaking two languages, more than 100 six-year-old monolingual and bilingual children were studied. Children involved were English monolinguals, Chinese-English bilinguals, French-English bilinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals. Three tasks measuring verbal development and one nonverbal task measuring executive control were used to compare the children. All the children came from a similar socioeconomic background.
What the study showed was that the bilingual groups differed in the degree of similarity between languages, cultural background, immigration, and language of schooling. However, in the executive control task in which the children needed to switch between two sorting rules to classify a set of pictures, all bilingual groups performed in a similar way and were better than the monolingual group. Differences in language, culture, and immigration all produced the same bilingual advantage compared with monolinguals. In terms of language tasks, the best performance was achieved by bilingual children whose language of instruction was the same as the test language and whose two languages had more overlap.
“In sum, executive control outcomes for bilingual children are general, but performance on verbal tasks is specific to factors in the bilingual experience, like how close a child’s two language are, and whether they are assessed in the same language they are taught in school,” according to Ellen Bialystok, Distinguished Research Professor in the department of psychology at York University, who took part in the study.
Dr. Bialystok will be a keynote presenter at the Brain Power Conference where she we will present these findings and more. Join us for two days of presentations and workshops on May 3-4, 2012 in Toronto.
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