EMACS Research Unit, University of Luxembourg, Walferdange, Luxembourg.
Memory. 2011 Jul;19(5):529-37. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2011.590504.
This research investigates whether early childhood bilingualism affects working memory performance in 6- to 8-year-olds, followed over a longitudinal period of 3 years. The study tests the hypothesis that bilinguals might exhibit more efficient working memory abilities than monolinguals, potentially via the opportunity a bilingual environment provides to train cognitive control by combating interference and intrusions from the non-target language. A total of 44 bilingual and monolingual children, matched on age, sex, and socioeconomic status, completed assessments of working memory (simple span and complex span tasks), fluid intelligence, and language (vocabulary and syntax). The data showed that the monolinguals performed significantly better on the language measures across the years, whereas no language group effect emerged on the working memory and fluid intelligence tasks after verbal abilities were considered. The study suggests that the need to manage several language systems in the bilingual mind has an impact on children's language skills while having little effects on the development of working memory.
本研究调查了 6 至 8 岁的幼儿早期双语是否会影响工作记忆表现，并在 3 年的纵向期间进行了跟踪。该研究检验了这样一种假设，即双语者可能比单语者表现出更有效的工作记忆能力，这可能是因为双语环境提供了通过对抗来自非目标语言的干扰和入侵来训练认知控制的机会。共有 44 名双语和单语儿童，按年龄、性别和社会经济地位匹配，完成了工作记忆（简单跨度和复杂跨度任务）、流体智力和语言（词汇和语法）的评估。数据显示，在整个研究期间，单语者在语言测试中的表现明显更好，而在考虑了语言能力后，在工作记忆和流体智力任务中没有出现语言组效应。该研究表明，在双语思维中管理多个语言系统的需要会对儿童的语言技能产生影响，而对工作记忆的发展几乎没有影响。
