Pino Escobar Gloria, Kalashnikova Marina, Escudero Paola
The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia; ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Acton, ACT 2601, Australia.
The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2018 Jun;170:177-189. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2018.01.012. Epub 2018 Feb 22.
The role of early bilingual experience in the development of skills in the general cognitive and linguistic domains remains poorly understood. This study investigated the link between these two domains by assessing inhibitory control processes in school-aged monolingual and bilingual children with similar English receptive vocabulary size. The participants, 8-year-old monolinguals and bilinguals, completed two Verbal Fluency Tasks (VFTs), letter and category, and two measures of inhibitory control. Results showed that bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on the VFTs, but performance was similar on the inhibitory control measures approaching ceiling for both monolingual and bilingual children. Importantly, it was shown that both vocabulary proficiency and general inhibitory control skills underlie monolingual and bilingual children's performance on VFTs. These results demonstrate that vocabulary proficiency plays a fundamental role in comparing monolingual and bilingual VFT performance. The bilingual advantage found in this study seems to have escaped previous studies that did not account for vocabulary size in populations of bilingual and monolingual school-aged children.
早期双语经历在一般认知和语言领域技能发展中的作用仍未得到充分理解。本研究通过评估英语接受性词汇量相似的学龄单语和双语儿童的抑制控制过程，调查了这两个领域之间的联系。参与者为8岁的单语和双语儿童，他们完成了两项言语流畅性任务（VFTs），即字母和类别任务，以及两项抑制控制测量。结果表明，双语儿童在VFTs上的表现优于单语儿童，但在抑制控制测量方面，单语和双语儿童的表现接近上限，二者相似。重要的是，研究表明词汇熟练度和一般抑制控制技能是单语和双语儿童在VFTs上表现的基础。这些结果表明，词汇熟练度在比较单语和双语儿童的VFT表现中起着至关重要的作用。本研究中发现的双语优势似乎在之前的研究中未被发现，这些研究没有考虑双语和单语学龄儿童群体中的词汇量。
