Examination of the Bilingual Advantage in the Executive Function of German Preschool Children

• In Event: 1-197 - Assessment and Development of Executive Function in Early Childhood

Integrative Statement

Introduction: A major challenge for children's development is the ability to regulate cognitions, emotions and behaviors with regard to overriding long-term goals. This requires executive function (EF) which allows new information to be incorporated and updated in working memory (updating), to deliberately suppress dominant reactions (inhibition) and to switch flexibly between tasks (shifting). High EF skills are associated with positive outcomes in various areas of life, e.g. for a successful school career, mental and physical health and quality of life. Advanced skills in EF have been found in bilingual speakers compared to monolingual controls, and this relationship is referred to as the bilingual advantage. The bilingual advantage is mainly studied with adults and school children. The few existing studies with preschool children point to rather heterogeneous results, which may be due to different definitions of bilingualism (simultaneous versus successive bilinguals) or a limited number of EF tasks assessed within the same study.
Hypotheses: Based on studies with older children and adults, two hypotheses emerged, (a) that there is a link between language acquisition type and EF performance, and (b) that simultaneous bilingual children perform better in EF than monolingual children.
Study population: 242 preschool-children (46.3% girls; Mage=67.66 months, SD=3.82) divided into one of three language acquisition types participated in the study: monolingual German (L1, n=129), simultaneous bilingual (2L1, n=47) and sequential bilingual (L2, n=66). L1 children outperformed their L2 peers in all language competence tasks, as expected, while they only outperformed their 2L1 peers in some of those tasks.
Methods: Inhibition was assessed with a GoNoGo-task, shifting with the Hearts-and-Flowers-Task, and updating with backward spans. Furthermore, behavioral self-regulation was assessed with the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders-task. The socioeconomic status (SES) was measured by the number of books owned as reported by the children.
Results: Repeated Measures ANOVAs were used for the task blocks of each EF measure to compare the children’s performance in the EF tasks. Although there were significant main effects of the language acquisition type in most analyses, no advantages of 2L1 children compared to L1 children could be found in any of the EF tasks. The L2 children, however, often scored worse than the L1 children. Likewise, no significant interaction between task complexity and language acquisition type was revealed. SES did not contribute to performance differences in the inhibition, shifting and self-regulation tasks but emerged as a significant covariate in the updating task.
Conclusion: This study cannot confirm the existence of a bilingual advantage in preschool. This could be due to the fact that the children are still very young and are therefore still at the beginning of their EF development, meaning that the children generally do not have the necessary amount of practice or experience in the EF to be able to develop an advantage that goes beyond the linguistic advantage. Since the children of different language acquisition type in pre-school do not (yet) differ in their EF, it is important to give them the same attention in terms of support measures to enable the most positive development possible.

Authors

• Sina Simone Huschka, German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF)
  Presenting Author

• Janin Brandenburg, German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF)
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jan Henning Ehm, German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF)
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marcus Hasselhorn, German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF)
  Non-Presenting Author