The effect of childhood bilectalism and multilingualism on executive control.
View / Open Files
Publication Date
2016-04Journal Title
Cognition
ISSN
0010-0277
Publisher
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027715301165?via%3Dihub#ak005
Volume
149
Pages
18-30
Language
eng
Type
Article
This Version
AM
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Antoniou, K., Grohmann, K. K., Kambanaros, M., & Katsos, N. (2016). The effect of childhood bilectalism and multilingualism on executive control.. Cognition, 149 18-30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2015.12.002
Abstract
Several investigations report a positive effect of childhood bilingualism on executive control (EC). An issue that has remained largely unexamined is the role of the typological distance between the languages spoken by bilinguals. In the present study we focus on children who grow up with Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek, two closely related varieties that differ from each other on all levels of language analysis (vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar). We compare the EC performance of such bilectal children to that of English-Greek multilingual children in Cyprus and Standard Modern Greek-speaking monolingual children in Greece. A principal component analysis on six indicators of EC revealed two distinct factors, which we interpreted as representing working memory and inhibition. Multilingual and bilectal children exhibited an advantage over monolinguals that was evident across EC factors and emerged only after statistically controlling for their lower language proficiency. These results demonstrate that similar EC advantages as previously reported for 'true' bilingual speakers can be found in bilectal children, which suggests that minimal typological distance between the varieties spoken by a child suffices to give rise to advantages in EC. They further indicate that the effect of speaking more than one language or dialect on EC performance is located across the EC system without a particular component being selectively affected. This has implications for models of the locus of the bilingual advantage in EC performance. Finally, they show that the emergence of EC advantages in bilinguals is moderated by the level of their language proficiency.
Keywords
Bilectalism, Executive control, Multilingualism, Typological distance, Child, Child, Preschool, Executive Function, Female, Humans, Inhibition (Psychology), Male, Memory, Short-Term, Multilingualism
Sponsorship
arts of this research have been funded by an ESF Experimental Pragmatics Network (Euro-XPrag) collaborative grant to all authors, an ESRC Experimental Pragmatics Network in the UK (XPrag-UK; RES-810-21-0069), a Cambridge Humanities Grant, and an Isaac Newton Trust Research Grant to the first and fourth authors, and an Alexander Onassis Foundation scholarship for graduate studies to the first author.
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2015.12.002
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/293101
Rights
Licence:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Statistics
Total file downloads (since January 2020). For more information on metrics see the
IRUS guide.