Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.
PLoS One. 2021 Aug 5;16(8):e0255157. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0255157. eCollection 2021.
Some studies have found a bilingual advantage in children's executive function and some failed to find a bilingual advantage. For example, the results of a previous study by Bialystok & Martin (2004) indicated that Chinese-English bilingual preschool children outperformed English monolingual children in solving the dimensional change card sort (DCCS). The goal of our study was to replicate this study using the same dimensional change card sort task. We also tested our participants on vocabulary and digit span. Our participants were 40 English monolingual and 40 Mandarin-English bilingual children and were within the same age range as the children in Bialystok & Martin's (2004) study. Our results showed no difference between bilinguals and monolinguals. Both groups of children in the present study performed better than those in Bialystok and Martin (2004), but the bigger difference was between the two groups of monolinguals. These results suggest that it could be important to attend to monolingual children's performance, in addition to bilinguals', when testing for a bilingual advantage. Our replication study is important because it helps with clarifying the validity of studies finding a bilingual advantage and to help future researchers know whether to build on their findings or not.
一些研究发现双语儿童在执行功能方面具有优势，而另一些研究则没有发现双语儿童具有优势。例如，Bialystok 和 Martin（2004）之前的一项研究结果表明，中英双语学龄前儿童在解决维度变化卡片分类（DCCS）任务方面优于英语单语儿童。我们的研究目的是使用相同的维度变化卡片分类任务来复制这项研究。我们还在词汇和数字跨度方面对参与者进行了测试。我们的参与者是 40 名英语单语儿童和 40 名汉语-英语双语儿童，他们的年龄与 Bialystok 和 Martin（2004）研究中的儿童相同。我们的研究结果显示双语儿童和单语儿童之间没有差异。与 Bialystok 和 Martin（2004）相比，本研究中的两组儿童表现都更好，但单语儿童之间的差异更大。这些结果表明，在测试双语优势时，除了双语儿童外，关注单语儿童的表现也很重要。我们的复制研究很重要，因为它有助于澄清发现双语优势的研究的有效性，并帮助未来的研究人员了解他们是应该基于这些发现还是不基于这些发现。
