Bilingualism changes children's beliefs about what is innate

Young children engage in essentialist reasoning about natural kinds, believing that many traits are innately determined. This study investigated whether personal experience with second language acquisition could alter children's essentialist biases. In a switched‐at‐birth paradigm, 5‐ and 6‐year‐old monolingual and simultaneous bilingual children expected that a baby's native language, an animal's vocalizations, and an animal's physical traits would match those of a birth rather than of an adoptive parent. We predicted that sequential bilingual children, who had been exposed to a new language after age 3, would show greater understanding that languages are learned. Surprisingly, sequential bilinguals showed reduced essentialist beliefs about all traits: they were significantly more likely than other children to believe that human language, animal vocalizations, and animal physical traits would be learned through experience rather than innately endowed. These findings suggest that bilingualism in the preschool years can profoundly change children's essentialist biases.     

Once a French Speaker,Always a French Speaker? Bilingual Children's Thinking About the Stability of Language

Despite early emerging and impressive linguistic abilities, young children demonstrate ostensibly puzzling beliefs about the nature of language. In some circumstances monolingual children even express the belief that an individual's language is more stable than her race. The present research investigated bilingual children's thinking about the relative stability of language and race (Kinzler & Dautel, 2012). Five‐to six‐year‐old bilingual children were asked to judge whether a target child who varied in race (White or Black) and language (English or French) would grow up to be an adult who maintained the target child's race or her language. Similar to many monolingual children, a heterogeneous group of bilingual children on average chose the language‐match. Yet French‐English bilingual children were relatively more likely to choose the race‐match, especially when tested in their non‐dominant language. Specific experience with relevant languages, and communicating in a non‐dominant language, may contribute to children's developing metalinguistic success and their thinking about social categorization.     

The bilingual advantage in novel word learning

The present study examined whether bilingualism facilitates acquisition of novel words in adults with different language histories. Word-learning performance was tested in monolingual English speakers, early English—Spanish bilinguals, and early English—Mandarin bilinguals. Novel words were phonologically unfamiliar to all participants, and they were acquired in association with their English translations. At testing, both bilingual groups outperformed the monolingual group. These findings indicate that bilingualism facilitates word-learning performance in adults, and they suggest a general bilingual advantage for novel word learning.     

Theory of Mind and Executive Functions in Young Bilingual Children

Few studies have explored the relationship between theory of mind (ToM), executive function (EF), and bilingualism at the same time. In this study 14 young bilingual children were compared with monolingual children on a test battery composed of 5 ToM tests, 5 EF tests, and 1 test of general language ability. The result showed that despite significantly lower verbal ability, the bilingual children outperformed the monolingual ones on tests of EF. There were no differences in ToM performance. The authors argue that there is a strong relationship between bilingualism and EF, but, contrary to results from earlier studies, they could not find any relationship between bilingualism and ToM. EF did not predict ToM performance. Lack of a significant relationship could be due to the children's young age and consequently their low scores on the ToM tasks.     

Attentional control in early and later bilingual children

We examined differences in attentional control among school-age children who were monolingual English speakers, early Spanish-English bilinguals (who began speaking both languages by age 3), and later Spanish-English bilingual children (who began speaking English after age 3). Children's attentional control was tested using the Attention Network Test (ANT). All language groups performed equally on ANT networks; however, when controlling for age and verbal ability, groups differed significantly on reaction time. Early bilingual children responded faster on the ANT compared to both monolingual and later bilingual children, suggesting an attentional monitoring advantage for early bilinguals. These results add to evidence of advantaged cognitive functioning among bilinguals and are consistent with the possibility that children who begin speaking a second language earlier in childhood have greater advantages, due either to effects of acquiring a second language earlier or to longer duration of bilingual experience.     

Syntactic awareness in young monolingual and bilingual (Urdu–English) children

In two experiments, bilingual (Urdu and English) 5- and 6-year-old children outperformed their monolingual (English) peers when asked to detect grammatically incorrect sentences on a syntactic awareness test. This result occurred when children were tested in English (Experiment 1) and when they were tested in English or in Urdu (Experiment 2). Bilingual children aged 3 and 4 were better at detecting grammatically incorrect sentences than their monolingual peers, but only when tested in Urdu. However, no significant differences appeared in monolingual and bilingual children's ability to detect grammatically correct sentences, suggesting that both grammatically correct and incorrect sentences should be used to obtain an accurate measure of syntactic awareness. The issue of whether it is bilingualism or the properties of a language that affect syntactic awareness is considered.     

A bilingual advantage in visual language discrimination in infancy

The origins of the bilingual advantage in various cognitive tasks are largely unknown. We tested the hypothesis that bilinguals' early capacities to track their native languages separately and learn about the properties of each may be at the origin of such differences. Spanish-Catalan bilingual and Spanish or Catalan monolingual infants watched silent video recordings of French-English bilingual speakers and were tested on their ability to discern when the language changed from French to English or vice versa. The infants' performance was compared with that of previously tested French-English bilingual and English monolingual infants. Although all groups of monolingual infants failed to detect the change between English and French, both groups of bilingual infants succeeded. These findings reveal that bilingual experience can modulate the attentional system even without explicit training or feedback. They provide a basis for explaining the ontogeny of the general cognitive advantages of bilinguals.     

How bilingual experience and executive control influence development in language control among bilingual children

This longitudinal study investigates whether the development in executive control and bilingual experience predicts change in language control in bilingual children. Children were tested twice over the course of 1 year, using the language‐switching paradigm and the Simon task. The participants were Japanese‐English bilingual “returnee” children (ages 7–13), who returned to their first language (L1) environment after spending some years in a second language (L2) dominant environment. Testing these children upon their return to the L1 environment allowed us to disentangle the effect of age from bilingual experience, as they experienced an increase in age but a decrease in L2 exposure over time. Children who had less L2 exposure showed smaller improvement in baseline performance when naming pictures in English (i.e., when English was relevant across all trials). Moreover, development in trials where children had to switch between languages were modulated by development in executive control. That is, children who increased their performance in the English mixed repetition trials also performed better on the executive control task over time. Thus, development in executive control modulated change in language control among bilingual children, suggesting a positive relationship between language control and executive control in children's development.     

Bilingual toddlers’ comprehension of mixed sentences is asymmetrical across their two languages

In bilingual language environments, infants and toddlers listen to two separate languages during the same key years that monolingual children listen to just one and bilinguals rarely learn each of their two languages at the same rate. Learning to understand language requires them to cope with challenges not found in monolingual input, notably the use of two languages within the same utterance (e.g., Do you like the perro? or ¿Te gusta el doggy?). For bilinguals of all ages, switching between two languages can reduce the efficiency in real‐time language processing. But language switching is a dynamic phenomenon in bilingual environments, presenting the young learner with many junctures where comprehension can be derailed or even supported. In this study, we tested 20 Spanish–English bilingual toddlers (18‐ to 30‐months) who varied substantially in language dominance. Toddlers’ eye movements were monitored as they looked at familiar objects and listened to single‐language and mixed‐language sentences in both of their languages. We found asymmetrical switch costs when toddlers were tested in their dominant versus non‐dominant language, and critically, they benefited from hearing nouns produced in their dominant language, independent of switching. While bilingualism does present unique challenges, our results suggest a united picture of early monolingual and bilingual learning. Just like monolinguals, experience shapes bilingual toddlers’ word knowledge, and with more robust representations, toddlers are better able to recognize words in diverse sentences.     

Independent effects of bilingualism and socioeconomic status on language ability and executive functioning

One hundred and seventy-five children who were 6-years old were assigned to one of four groups that differed in socioeconomic status (SES; working class or middle class) and language background (monolingual or bilingual). The children completed tests of nonverbal intelligence, language tests assessing receptive vocabulary and attention based on picture naming, and two tests of executive functioning. All children performed equivalently on the basic intelligence tests, but performance on the language and executive functioning tasks was influenced by both SES and bilingualism. Middle-class children outperformed working-class children on all measures, and bilingual children obtained lower scores than monolingual children on language tests but higher scores than monolingual children on the executive functioning tasks. There were no interactions with either group factors or task factors. Thus, each of SES and bilingualism contribute significantly and independently to children’s development irrespective of the child’s level on the other factor.     

Foundations of infants' social group evaluations

Previous research has suggested that infants exhibit a preference for familiar over unfamiliar social groups (e.g., preferring individuals from their own language group over individuals from a foreign language group). However, because past studies often employ forced‐choice procedures, it is not clear whether infants' intergroup preferences are driven by positivity toward members of familiar groups, negativity toward members of unfamiliar groups, or both. Across six experiments, we implemented a habituation procedure to independently measure infants' positive and negative evaluations of speakers of familiar and unfamiliar languages. We report that by 1 year of age, infants positively evaluate individuals who speak a familiar language, but do not negatively evaluate individuals who speak an unfamiliar language (Experiments 1 and 2). Several experiments rule out lower‐level explanations (Experiments 3–6). Together these data suggest that children's early social group preferences may be shaped by positive evaluations of familiar group(s), rather than negative evaluations of unfamiliar groups.     

Developmental associations between bilingual experience and inhibitory control trajectories in Head Start children

Children from lower socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds tend to be at‐risk for executive function (EF) impairments by the time they are in preschool, placing them at an early disadvantage for academic success. The present study examined the potentially protective role of bilingual experience on the development of inhibitory control (IC) in 1146 Head Start preschoolers who were followed for an 18‐month period during the transition to kindergarten as part of the longitudinal Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) 2009 study. Using three waves of data, we predicted individual variation in developmental trajectories of IC for three groups that differed in bilingual experience—English monolinguals, Spanish‐English bilinguals, and a group of children who transitioned from being Spanish monolingual to Spanish‐English bilinguals during the course of the study. Compared to their English monolingual peers, bilingual children from Spanish‐speaking homes showed higher IC performance at Head Start entry, as well as steeper IC growth over time. Children who were Spanish monolingual at the beginning of Head Start showed the lowest IC performance at baseline. However, their rate of IC growth exceeded that of children who remained English monolingual and did not differ from that of their peers who entered Head Start being bilingual. These results suggest that acquiring bilingualism and continued bilingual experience are associated with more rapid IC development during the transition from preschool to kindergarten in children from lower SES backgrounds.     

Word Mapping and Executive Functioning in Young Monolingual and Bilingual Children

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 4.5-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 attentional networks 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.     

Reading,syntactic, orthographic,and working memory skills of bilingual Arabic-English speaking Canadian children

This study assessed the reading, language, and memory skills of 56 bilingual Arab-Canadian children age's 9-14. English was their main instructional language, and Arabic was the language spoken at home. All children attended a Heritage Language Program in Toronto where they were taught to read and write Arabic. The children were administered word and pseudo-word reading, language, and working memory tests in English and Arabic. The majority of the children showed at least adequate proficiency in both languages. There was a significant relationship between the acquisition of word and pseudo-word reading working memory, and syntactic awareness skills in the two languages. The poor readers in Arabic had lower scores on all linguistic tasks, except the visual task. There were no significant differences between bilingual English Arabic children and monolingual English-speaking children on the reading, language, and memory tasks. However, bilingual English Arabic children who had reading problems in English had higher scores on English pseudo-word reading and spelling tasks than monolingual English-speaking children with reading disabilities, probably because of positive transfer from the regular nature of Arabic orthography. In this case, bilingualism does not appear to have negative consequences for the development of language reading skills in both languages—Arabic and English—despite the different nature of the two orthographies.     

Neuroanatomical profiles of bilingual children

The goal of the present study was to examine differences in cortical thickness, cortical surface area, and subcortical volume between bilingual children who are highly proficient in two languages (i.e., English and Spanish) and bilingual children who are mainly proficient in one of the languages (i.e., Spanish). All children (N = 49) learned Spanish as a native language (L1) at home and English as a second language (L2) at school. Proficiency of both languages was assessed using the standardized Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery. Five‐minute high‐resolution anatomical scans were acquired with a 3‐Tesla scanner. The degree of discrepancy between L1 and L2 proficiency was used to classify the children into two groups: children with balanced proficiency and children with unbalanced proficiency. The groups were comparable on language history, parental education, and other variables except English proficiency. Values of cortical thickness and surface area of the transverse STG, IFG‐pars opercularis, and MFG, as well as subcortical volume of the caudate and putamen, were extracted from FreeSurfer. Results showed that children with balanced bilingualism had thinner cortices of the left STG, left IFG, left MFG and a larger bilateral putamen, whereas unbalanced bilinguals showed thicker cortices of the same regions and a smaller putamen. Additionally, unbalanced bilinguals with stronger foreign accents in the L2 showed reduced surface areas of the MFG and STS bilaterally. The results suggest that balanced/unbalanced bilingualism is reflected in different neuroanatomical characteristics that arise from biological and/or environmental factors.     

Perspective-taking ability in bilingual children: Extending advantages in executive control to spatial reasoning

Monolingual and bilingual 8-year-olds performed a computerized spatial perspective-taking task. Children were asked to decide how an observer saw a four-block array from one of three different positions (90°, 180°, and 270° counter-clockwise from the child's position) by selecting one of four responses – the correct response, the egocentric error, an incorrect choice in which the array was correct but in the wrong orientation for the viewer, and an incorrect choice in which the array included an internal spatial error. All children performed similarly on background measures, including fluid intelligence, but bilingual children were more accurate than monolingual children in calculating the observer's view across all three positions, with no differences in the pattern of errors committed by the two language groups. The results are discussed in terms of the effect of bilingualism on modifying performance in a complex spatial task that has implications for academic achievement.     

Working memory in multilingual children: Is there a bilingual effect?

This research investigates whether early childhood bilingualism affects working memory performance in 6- to 8-year-olds, followed over a longitudinal period of 3 years. The study tests the hypothesis that bilinguals might exhibit more efficient working memory abilities than monolinguals, potentially via the opportunity a bilingual environment provides to train cognitive control by combating interference and intrusions from the non-target language. A total of 44 bilingual and monolingual children, matched on age, sex, and socioeconomic status, completed assessments of working memory (simple span and complex span tasks), fluid intelligence, and language (vocabulary and syntax). The data showed that the monolinguals performed significantly better on the language measures across the years, whereas no language group effect emerged on the working memory and fluid intelligence tasks after verbal abilities were considered. The study suggests that the need to manage several language systems in the bilingual mind has an impact on children's language skills while having little effects on the development of working memory.     

Language-experience facilitates discrimination of /d-th/ in monolingual and bilingual acquisition of English

To trace how age and language experience shape the discrimination of native and non-native phonetic contrasts, we compared 4-year-olds learning either English or French or both and simultaneous bilingual adults on their ability to discriminate the English /d-th/ contrast. Findings show that the ability to discriminate the native English contrast improved with age. However, in the absence of experience with this contrast, discrimination of French children and adults remained unchanged during development. Furthermore, although simultaneous bilingual and monolingual English adults were comparable, children exposed to both English and French were poorer at discriminating this contrast when compared to monolingual English-learning 4-year-olds. Thus, language experience facilitates perception of the English /d-th/ contrast and this facilitation occurs later in development when English and French are acquired simultaneously. The difference between bilingual and monolingual acquisition has implications for language organization in children with simultaneous exposure.     

Monolingual but not bilingual infants demonstrate racial bias in social cue use

Bilingualism exerts early and pervasive effects on cognition, observable in infancy. Thus far, investigations of infant bilingual cognition have focused on sensitivity to visual memory, executive function, and linguistic sensitivity. Much less research has focused on how bilingualism impacts processing of social cues. The present study sought to investigate whether bilingualism modulates the expression of one aspect of social processing: early racial bias. Using a gaze‐following paradigm, we investigated whether 18‐ to 20‐month‐old monolingual and bilingual infants favored their own race. Results demonstrated that monolingual infants favored their own race in following a model whose direction of gaze signaled an event. In contrast, bilingual infants demonstrated race‐neutral gaze‐following patterns, relying more heavily on the reliability of the behavior of the model over race. Findings suggest that bilingualism may have protective effects against the early emergence of racial bias.     

Do you understand what I want to tell you? Early sensitivity in bilinguals' iconic gesture perception and production

Previous research has shown differences in monolingual and bilingual communication. We explored whether monolingual and bilingual pre‐schoolers (N = 80) differ in their ability to understand others' iconic gestures (gesture perception) and produce intelligible iconic gestures themselves (gesture production) and how these two abilities are related to differences in parental iconic gesture frequency. In a gesture perception task, the experimenter replaced the last word of every sentence with an iconic gesture. The child was then asked to choose one of four pictures that matched the gesture as well as the sentence. In a gesture production task, children were asked to indicate ‘with their hands’ to a deaf puppet which objects to select. Finally, parental gesture frequency was measured while parents answered three different questions. In the iconic gesture perception task, monolingual and bilingual children did not differ. In contrast, bilinguals produced more intelligible gestures than their monolingual peers. Finally, bilingual children's parents gestured more while they spoke than monolingual children's parents. We suggest that bilinguals' heightened sensitivity to their interaction partner supports their ability to produce intelligible gestures and results in a bilingual advantage in iconic gesture production.