Submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree Masters in Research Psychology, University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, School of Human and Community Development, 2016 / Background: South Africa finds itself at the heart of an ever escalating global trend towards
increased multilingualism. Along with this realisation has come an ever growing
investigation of the impact of bi/multilingualism on our cognitive abilities; both positively
and negatively.
Aim: This rationale gets explored here in order to investigate whether multilingualism
influences the executive functioning ability of South African youth.
Method: This was facilitated through the current study aiming to investigate the relationship
between the self reported language experience of 30 young adults and their performance on
executive function tasks. The four executive functions that were targeted were planning,
inhibition, cognitive flexibility and fluency.
Results and Conclusion: Taking the unique South African milieu into consideration results
indicated that for the characteristics investigated here cognitive flexibility did not show a
significant relationship with language experience. In turn planning and inhibition only
produced a moderate degree of significance for their relationships with language experience.
Finally fluency showed to have a significant relationship to the language experience of these
individuals. The South African reality and history was then engaged with in a discussion
around these results. The conclusion was then drawn that the South African population in this
sample did not perform to the preconceived internationally recorded influence of the
multilingual advantage. / GR2017
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/22343 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Lubbe, Maritza Elize |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | Online resource (vii, 91 leaves), application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf |
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