Department of Psychology, University of Koblenz-Landau, 76829 Landau in der Pfalz, Germany; Center for Research on Individual Development and Adaptive of Children at Risk (IDeA), 60323 Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Department of Educational Psychology, Leipzig University, 04109 Leipzig, Germany; Leipzig Research Center for Early Child Development, Leipzig University, 04109 Leipzig, Germany.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2022 Dec;224:105515. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105515. Epub 2022 Aug 4.
The effects of bilingualism on executive functions (EFs) and intelligence are still controversially discussed. Most studies have focused on performance differences without considering the underlying structure of cognitive abilities. Thus, we examined whether the structure of EFs and the relations of EFs with intelligence differ between mono- and bilingual children. A total of 240 elementary school children (mean age = 8 years 6 months; 133 monolinguals and 95 bilinguals) performed two tasks measuring working memory, inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and fluid intelligence, respectively. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that one common EF factor provided the best fit to the data in both language groups, indicating that bilingualism is not associated with differences in the EF structure at this age. Moreover, there were no latent performance differences in either EFs or intelligence between mono- and bilingual children. However, we found a stronger relation between a common EF factor and fluid intelligence in bilingual children as compared with monolingual children, implying a closer coupling of EFs and intelligence abilities in bilingual children. This contributes to explaining the previous heterogeneous findings on the task level because more closely coupled cognitive functioning can be slightly beneficial for some tasks and irrelevant or even slightly obstructive for others.
双语对执行功能（EFs）和智力的影响仍存在争议。大多数研究都集中在表现差异上，而没有考虑认知能力的潜在结构。因此，我们研究了双语儿童和单语儿童之间 EF 的结构以及 EF 与智力的关系是否存在差异。共有 240 名小学生（平均年龄 8 岁 6 个月；133 名单语者和 95 名双语者）分别完成了两项任务，分别测量工作记忆、抑制、认知灵活性和流体智力。验证性因子分析表明，在这两个语言群体中，一个共同的 EF 因素提供了最佳的拟合度，表明双语与这个年龄段的 EF 结构差异无关。此外，在 EF 或智力方面，单语儿童和双语儿童之间没有潜在的表现差异。然而，我们发现双语儿童中共同的 EF 因素与流体智力之间的关系更强，这意味着双语儿童的 EF 和智力能力更紧密地耦合。这有助于解释之前在任务水平上的异构发现，因为更紧密耦合的认知功能对于某些任务可能略有好处，而对于其他任务则无关或甚至略有阻碍。
