Contextual Bilingual Experience and Executive Functions among Bilingual Children and Adolescents in a Multilingual City

• In Event: Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

Background. The growing world population of bilinguals has spurred abundant research into the consequences of bilingualism, with particular interest in its cognitive effects among children. Findings from such research have been generally supported by studies demonstrating bilingual groups outperforming monolingual groups on cognitive tasks requiring executive functions (EF; with a few exceptions). However, recent literature on bilingualism has demonstrated the nuances of viewing bilingualism as a categorical variable (Surrain & Luk, 2017) as well as the challenges of generalizing results of studies on bilinguals who have diverse language acquisition histories and language experience (Kroll & Bialystok 2013; Whitford & Luk, 2019). Specifically, it is less clear how variations in children’s bilingual experiences associate with variation in EF performance.

Objectives. Our study aimed to examine how the variability of contextual bilingual experience relates to the development of EF in bilingual children and adolescents living in a multilingual community. Given that children develop their language capacities and EF throughout their school-aged years, age and bilingual experience will be assessed as continuous variables. Of particular interest are the language experiences in social contexts that are most relevant and meaningful for school-aged children. Adopting the framework of the Adaptive Control Hypothesis (ACH; Green & Abutalebi, 2013) we investigate whether more consistent bilingual usage and exposure across the contexts of home and school (i.e., contextual bilingual experience) was associated with EF performance.

Methods. Sixty-seven children and adolescents (39 males, ages 6–17 years) from the metropolitan area of Montréal completed two EF tasks; the Conners Continuous Performance Test (CPT-3), a clinical task of attention, and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, a more complex task that require the coordination of multiple EF components (i.e., monitoring). Parents of participants completed a revised version of the Language and Social Background Questionnaire (adapted from Anderson et al., 2017; Luk & Bialystok, 2013), which assessed the language and demographic background of the family and the language experience of the child.

Results. All participants reported having exposure to a second language (L2) and speaking their L2 to a wide degree of proficiency. Age was positively associated with both attention (β = –.40, t(62) = –3.38, p < .001) and monitoring (β = –.52, t(43) = –4.25, p < .001). In addition, the degree of bilingual experience contributed to performance on EF task of monitoring while controlling for age (β = –.55, t(43) = –2.67, p = 0.01).

Conclusion. Our findings demonstrate that bilingual experience across the context of home and school accounted for additional variation in EF performance beyond chronological age for bilingual children and adolescents. These results extend the framework of the ACH to children and adolescents, and its applicability in multiple social contexts. Further, our findings highlight the dynamic nature of bilingualism in developing bilinguals and the significance of considering multiple dimensions of bilingual experience relevant to their characteristics. A comprehensive view of bilingualism will allow future research to yield valuable insights on the sources of variations within language experience and enrich the characterization of bilingualism in children.

Authors

• Julie Oh, McGill University
  Presenting Author

• Gigi Luk, McGill University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Armando Bertone, Université de Montréal
  Non-Presenting Author