Bilingualism
Does being more balanced in two languages sharpen kids' thinking?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Being more evenly bilingual in Frisian and Dutch was linked to slightly better selective attention in young children, but only on one of four tasks and only in the first year.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cohort — Children tested annually for three years; degree of bilingualism (Frisian-Dutch language balance) and home Frisian exposure regressed on four executive-function tasks, controlling age and IQ.
- N
- N=120 · 120 children analysed (122 tested at time 1, two dropped out); a few individual task scores were excluded.
- Population
- Frisian-Dutch bilingual children aged 5-6 at the start, from 14 rural schools in Fryslân, the Netherlands
- Outcome
- Selective attention (Sky Search), interference suppression (Flanker effect), verbal and visuospatial backward span working memory
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Key findings
Language balance correlated only with the selective attention task. After controlling age and IQ, more balanced bilinguals did better on it at time 1, the effect was only marginal at time 2, and it disappeared by time 3. Home exposure to Frisian strongly predicted language balance and showed the same fading pattern for selective attention, apparently working through balance. There were no effects on the Flanker task or either working memory task.
Methodology
The researchers followed 120 Frisian-Dutch bilingual children from age 5-6 to age 7-8, testing them once a year. They measured each child's vocabulary and grammar in both languages to compute language balance, and asked parents how much Frisian the child heard at home. Each year children did four executive-function tasks: a visual search task for selective attention, a Flanker task for resisting distraction, and backward digit and dot span tasks for working memory.
Limitations
The design is correlational: balanced bilinguals may differ from Dutch-dominant children in other ways, such as family culture, that were not measured. There was no monolingual comparison group, and with four tasks and three waves, a single significant effect could be a chance finding. The authors can only speculate about why the effect vanished (for example, literacy instruction boosting visual search for everyone), and the study was not reviewed by an ethics committee beforehand.
How this study connects
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