An emerging topic in cognitive development is whether being bilingual constitutes an advantage in children’s performance on executive function (EF) tasks. The purpose of this study was to compare the performance of EF tasks in English monolingual children and German-English bilingual children aged 3 to 6 years old. Fifty-six children completed tasks of short-term memory, working memory, inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and verbal ability. No significant difference was found between the performance of bilingual and monolingual children in EF
tasks, even when level of language proficiency was taken into account. Monolingual children performed better on measures of English verbal ability than bilingual children. Limitation to the study and avenues for future research are presented.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/3177 |
| Date | 22 December 2010 |
| Creators | Hutchison, Sarah Michelle |
| Contributors | Muller, Ulrich |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
Page generated in 0.0014 seconds