Bilingualism
Does switching languages make bilingual children better at switching tasks?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Bilingual children who were faster at switching between Turkish and Dutch were also faster at switching between colour and shape rules, yet they were no better at nonverbal switching than monolingual peers.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Bilingual vs monolingual children matched on age and nonverbal IQ, compared on a cued colour/shape switching task (MANOVA/MANCOVA with SES and Dutch vocabulary as covariates); bilinguals also did a cued picture-naming language-switching task for correlational analysis
- N
- N=54 · 54 children: 27 Turkish-Dutch bilinguals and 27 Dutch monolinguals; within-group correlations use the 27 bilinguals
- Population
- Children aged 5-8 (mean 7.5) attending Dutch-only elementary schools in the Netherlands
- Outcome
- Task-switching accuracy, response time, switching cost and mixing cost; language-switching naming times and costs
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Key findings
Before controls, bilinguals were if anything worse: they tended toward lower accuracy and larger switching costs and had significantly slower responses and larger mixing costs. Once SES and Dutch vocabulary were controlled, the groups did not differ on any measure. Within the bilingual group, response times in the language-switching and nonverbal switching blocks were correlated for both Dutch and Turkish trials, and these correlations held after controlling for age, nonverbal IQ, SES and vocabulary, but switching and mixing costs on the two tasks were unrelated.
Methodology
The study compared 27 Turkish-Dutch bilingual children and 27 Dutch monolingual children, aged 5 to 8 and matched on age and nonverbal IQ, on a computer task in which a cartoon cue told them to sort shapes by colour or by shape, mixing both rules in one block. The bilingual children also named pictures in Dutch or Turkish depending on which of two cartoon 'speakers' appeared, switching languages unpredictably. The researchers compared groups with and without controlling for family socioeconomic status (SES) and Dutch vocabulary, and correlated the two switching tasks within the bilingual group.
Limitations
The groups could not be matched on SES or Dutch vocabulary, so these differences had to be handled statistically, and other unmeasured factors such as music lessons or gaming could differ between groups. With 27 children per group, a small advantage could be missed; the authors argue power was adequate based on an earlier study, but their task had fewer trials than that study. The within-bilingual link is a correlation in a small sample and rests on overall response times rather than on switching costs, so it shows shared speed of control but not that language practice trains general control.
How this study connects
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