Spatial role-taking ability among bilingual and monolingual kindergarten children

Fifty-seven children enrolled in a bilingual Spanish kindergarten program, assigned to appropriate language and age-related groups, were shown a graduated sequence of increasingly complex arrangements of multicolored blocks and were asked to judge how the original arrangement would look from the opposite and the side perspectives. A series of 2(younger vs. older) x 3(Spanish Monolingual vs. English Monolingual vs. Spanish-English Bilingual) ANOVAs for each of the types of responses (correct, incorrect, egocentric) showed a significant main effect for age on the incorrect answers. No differences associated with egocentrism were obtained. There was no relationship between age and success with simple and complex spatial tasks. As opposed to other studies that suggest certain cognitive advantages for young bilingual children, this study indicates no perceptible differences associated with being monolingual or bilingual at the ages of 5 and 6 for spatial tasks.