Presenter

Anahita Shokrkon, Department of Psychology, University of Alberta

Abstract

Some studies have shown bilingual advantages in executive function. For example, Bialystok and Martin (2004) found that bilingual preschool children outperformed monolingual children in performing the dimensional change card sort. In this task, children are asked to sort cards with images according to one dimension of the image (e.g., colour) and then asked to sort the same cards according to another dimension (e.g., shape). Young children often continue to sort the cards according to the first rule, suggesting difficulties with cognitive flexibility. Other studies have not found bilingual advantages on similar tasks, leading to calls for replication. The goal of our study was to replicate this study using the same task, the same age range (4-6 year olds), slightly higher sample size (their study: 36 children per group; our study: 40 children per group), bilingual children who spoke the same language pair (Chinese and English), and monolingual children who spoke the same language (English), with all children living in the same country (Canada) as the Bialystok and Martin (2004) study. In addition to the dimensional change card sort task, we also tested our participants on vocabulary, verbal working memory (digit span), and visuospatial working memory (object assembly). In our study, we found no difference between bilinguals and monolinguals on performance on the dimensional change card sort task. Both groups of children in the present study tended to perform better than the respective groups in Bialystok and Martin (2004), but the bigger difference was between the two groups of monolinguals. We argue that the monolingual children in our study were performing quite similarly to monolinguals of the same age in other studies. These results suggest that it could be important to attend to monolingual children’s performance, in addition to bilinguals’, when testing for a bilingual advantage.

Poster

Authors & Affiliations

Anahita Shokrkon & Elena Nicoladis (Psychology Department, University of Alberta)