Early childhood bilingualism leads to advances in executive attention: Dissociating culture and language*

By Sujin Yang, Hwajin Yang, Barbara Lust. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2011

212 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study investigated whether early especially efficient utilization of executive functioning in young bilinguals would transcend potential cultural benefits. To dissociate potential cultural effects from bilingualism, four-year-old U.S. Korean–English bilingual children were compared to three monolingual groups – English and Korean monolinguals in the U.S.A. and another Korean monolingual group, in Korea. Overall, bilinguals were most accurate and fastest among all groups. The bilingual advantage was stronger than that of culture in the speed of attention processing, inverse processing efficiency independent of possible speed-accuracy trade-offs, and the network of executive control for conflict resolution. A culture advantage favoring Korean monolinguals from Korea was found in accuracy but at the cost of longer response times.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4829e4587796a1695fe649c6de7bb9471ae51d26

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Citations in the corpus

Bilingualism: Consequences for Mind and Brain (2012, background): “This pattern has been confirmed in studies of both children and adults using a flanker task (children: [74, 75]), theory of mind task (children: [76, 77]; adults: [78]), Simon task (children: [79]; adults: [44]).”
Are bilingual advantages dependent upon specific tasks or specific bilingual experiences? (2014, result): “Likewise, Yang, Yang, and Lust (2011) reported a bilingual advantage in flanker interference for Korean–English bilinguals (n = 15) in comparison to Korean monolinguals (n = 13) who were about 5-year-olds.”
The Bilingual Adaptation: How Minds Accommodate Experience (2017, background): “…controlled have shown that bilingual children (Blom et al., 2014; Engel de Abreu et al., 2012; Kang, Thoemmes, & Lust, 2016) and adults (Nair, Biedermann, & Nickels, in press) outperform monolinguals at both low levels of SES and high levels of SES (Morales et al., 2013: Yang et al., 2011).”