Morton J Bruce, Harper Sarah N
Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada.
Dev Sci. 2007 Nov;10(6):719-26. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00623.x.
Bilingual children often outperform monolingual children in tasks of cognitive control. This advantage may be a consequence of the fact that bilinguals have more practice controlling attention due to an ongoing need to manage two languages. However, existing evidence is limited because possible differences in ethnicity and socioeconomic status have not been properly controlled. To address this issue, we administered the Simon task to bilingual and monolingual children of identical ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Bilingual and monolingual children performed identically, whereas children from higher SES families were advantaged relative to children from lower SES families. Controlling differences in SES and ethnicity may attenuate the bilingual advantage in cognitive control.
双语儿童在认知控制任务中的表现通常优于单语儿童。这种优势可能是由于双语者因持续需要管理两种语言而有更多控制注意力的练习。然而，现有证据有限，因为种族和社会经济地位方面可能存在的差异没有得到适当控制。为了解决这个问题，我们对具有相同种族和社会经济背景的双语和单语儿童进行了西蒙任务测试。双语儿童和单语儿童表现相同，而来自较高社会经济地位家庭的儿童相对于来自较低社会经济地位家庭的儿童具有优势。控制社会经济地位和种族差异可能会削弱双语者在认知控制方面的优势。
