Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2010 Oct 1;11(4):485-508.
doi: 10.1080/15248372.2010.516420.

Word Mapping and Executive Functioning in Young Monolingual and Bilingual Children

Affiliations

Word Mapping and Executive Functioning in Young Monolingual and Bilingual Children

Ellen Bialystok et al. J Cogn Dev. .

Abstract

The effect of bilingualism on the cognitive skills of young children was investigated by comparing performance of 162 children who belonged to one of two age groups (approximately 3- and 4½-year-olds) and one of three language groups on a series of tasks examining executive control and word mapping. The children were monolingual English speakers, monolingual French speakers, or bilinguals who spoke English and one of a large number of other languages. Monolinguals obtained higher scores than bilinguals on a receptive vocabulary test and were more likely to demonstrate the mutual exclusivity constraint, especially at the younger ages. However, bilinguals obtained higher scores than both groups of monolinguals on three tests of executive functioning: Luria's tapping task measuring response inhibition, the Opposite Worlds task requiring children to assign incongruent labels to a sequence of animal pictures, and reverse categorization in which children needed to reclassify a set of objects into incongruent categories after an initial classification. There were no differences between the groups in the ANT flanker task requiring executive control to ignore a misleading cue. This evidence for a bilingual advantage in aspects of executive functioning at an earlier age than previously reported is discussed in terms of the possibility that bilingual language production may not be the only source of these developmental effects.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Mean increase for selections of novel object in novel label condition than in control condition by age group, language group, and gender

Similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Au TK, Glusman M. The principle of mutual exclusivity in word learning: To honor or not to honor? Child Development. 1990;61:1474–1490. - PubMed
    1. Bialystok E. Levels of bilingualism and levels of linguistic awareness. Developmental Psychology. 1988;24:560–567.
    1. Bialystok E. Cognitive complexity and attentional control in the bilingual mind. Child Development. 1999;70:636–644.
    1. Bialystok E. Bilingualism in development: Language, literacy, and cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press; 2001.
    1. Bialystok E. Claiming evidence from non-evidence: A reply to Morton and Harper. Developmental Science. 2009;12:499–501. - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources