Bilingualism
Are bilingual children better at working memory despite emotional distraction?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Bilingual children were more accurate than monolingual children on a working memory task with emotional faces as distractors, but they showed no special advantage in handling the emotional content.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Group comparison of monolingual vs bilingual children on an emotional-face n-back task with load (1-back, 2-back) and distractor emotion (angry, happy, neutral) varied within subjects.
- N
- N=93 · 93 children with complete data (48 monolingual, 45 bilingual) after 9 were removed for behaviour that stopped them completing tasks.
- Population
- Typically developing 8-11-year-olds from four English-language elementary schools in Canada
- Outcome
- Accuracy and reaction time on target and non-target n-back trials; parent and teacher ratings of attention and emotion regulation
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Key findings
Bilingual children hit more targets than monolinguals (67.83% versus 60.6%), with no bias toward answering yes, but they were slower on the harder 2-back condition, suggesting they traded speed for accuracy. The emotion of the faces did not affect accuracy; neutral faces slowed responses only in the easier 1-back condition, possibly because children found neutral faces hard to interpret. There was no language-group by emotion interaction, so the predicted bilingual advantage in emotion regulation did not appear, and teacher ratings showed no group differences.
Methodology
Researchers tested 93 children aged 8 to 11, split into monolingual and bilingual groups matched on age, family education, English vocabulary and non-verbal reasoning. Each child did an n-back task, judging whether a letter matched the one shown one or two trials earlier, while angry, happy or neutral faces flanked the letter. Parents and teachers also rated the children's attention and everyday emotion regulation.
Limitations
Children were not randomly assigned to be bilingual, so the working memory advantage could reflect other differences between families, such as culture or immigration background, despite matching on several measures. The study found no emotion regulation difference, so it cannot support claims that bilingualism improves emotional control. The paper includes no dedicated limitations section, the bilingual group spoke many different home languages, and the n-back with faces is a lab task that may not capture everyday emotion regulation.
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