Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-2lccl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T07:52:31.036Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Effects of home language environment on inhibitory control in bilingual three-year-old children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2015

JOSJE VERHAGEN ,
HANNA MULDER  and
PAUL P. M. LESEMAN
JOSJE VERHAGEN*
Affiliation:
Utrecht University
HANNA MULDER
Affiliation:
Utrecht University
PAUL P. M. LESEMAN
Affiliation:
Utrecht University
*
Address for correspondence: Dr. Josje Verhagen, Utrecht University, Department of Special Education: Cognitive and Motor Disabilities, Heidelberglaan 1, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands, J.Verhagen@uu.nl
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Previous studies have shown effects of bilingualism on inhibitory control in preschool children. However, these effects only held for ‘conflict tasks’, and not delay of gratification tasks, and other domains of executive functioning were not investigated. For older children, previous studies have found relationships between bilinguals’ advantages and home language environment. This study investigates effects of bilingualism and bilingual home language environment on executive functioning in three-year-old children. 200 bilingual and 829 monolingual three-year-olds performed tasks of inhibitory control, working memory, and selective attention. Home language environment characteristics were assessed through a parental questionnaire. The bilinguals outperformed the monolinguals on a conflict task only, and this effect was very small. Further analyses showed broader effects on inhibitory control that were related to home language environment: Bilinguals whose parents spoke different languages outperformed bilinguals whose parents spoke the same language on both the conflict task and a delay of gratification task.

Keywords

bilingualismbilingual home language environmentinhibitory controlworking memoryselective attentionthree-year-olds
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 114 - 127
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The Pre-COOL study was conducted in collaboration between the Department of Special Education at Utrecht University, the Kohnstamm Institute (KI) at the University of Amsterdam, and the Institute for Applied Social Sciences (ITS) at the Radboud University Nijmegen, and funded by the Dutch research council NWO (grant number 411–20–442). We are grateful to our project partners at the KI and the ITS. We are also grateful to all the children, families and day care centers who participated in our study.

References

Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in development: Language, literacy, and cognition. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E. (2010). Global-local and trail-making tasks by monolingual and bilingual children: beyond inhibition. Developmental Psychology, 46, 93–105.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E., Barac, R., Blaye, A., & Poulin-Dubois, P. (2011). Word mapping and executive functioning in young monolingual and bilingual children. Journal of Cognition and Development, 11, 485–508.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blom, E., Küntay, A. K., Messer, M. H., Verhagen, J., & Lesemann, P. P. M. (2014). The benefits of being bilingual: Working memory in bilingual Turkish-Dutch children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 128, 105–199.Google Scholar
Brito, N., & Barr, R. (2014). Flexible memory retrieval in bilingual 6-month-old infants. Developmental Psychobiology, 56, 1156–1163.Google Scholar
Calvo, A., & Bialystok, E. (2014). Independent effects of bilingualism and socioeconomic status on language ability and executive functioning. Cognition, 130, 278–288.Google Scholar
Carlson, S. M., Moses, L. J., & Breton, C. (2002). How specific is the relation between executive function and theory of mind? Contributions of inhibitory control and working memory. Infant and Child Development, 11, 73–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlson, S., Mandell, D., & Williams, L. (2004). Executive function and theory of mind: Stability and prediction from ages 2 to 3. Developmental Psychology, 40, 1105–1122.Google Scholar
Carlson, S. M., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2008). Bilingual experience and executive functioning in young children. Developmental Science, 11, 282–298.Google Scholar
Costa, A., Hernández, M., Costa-Faidella, J., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2009). On the bilingual advantage in conflict processing: Now you see it, now you don’t. Cognition, 113, 135–149.Google Scholar
Cuevas, K., & Bell, M. A. (2014). Infant attention and early childhood executive function. Child Development, 85, 397–404.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Diamond, A., & Taylor, C. (1996). Development of an aspect of executive control: Development of the abilities to remember what I said and to ‘do as I say not as I do’. Developmental Psychobiology, 29, 315–334.Google Scholar
Diamond, A., Prevor, M. B., Callender, G., & Druin, D. P. (1997). Prefrontal cortex cognitive deficits in children treated early and continuously for PKU. Monographs of the Society for 736 Research in Child Development, 62, i-206.Google Scholar
Diamond, A., Carlson, S. M., & Beck, D. M. (2006). Preschool children's performance in task switching on the Dimensional Change Card Sort task: Separating dimensions aids the ability to switch. Developmental Neuropsychology, 28, 689–729.Google Scholar
Dunn, L., & Dunn, L. M. (2005). Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III-NL. Nederlandse versie door Liesbeth Schlichting [Dutch version by Liesbeth Schlichting]. Amsterdam: Harcourt Assessment B.V. Google Scholar
Engel, P. M. J., Heloisa Dos Santos, F., & Gathercole, S. E. (2008). Are working memory measures free of socio-economic influence? Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 51, 1580–1587.Google Scholar
Engel de Abreu, P. M. A. (2011). Working memory in multilingual children: Is there a bilingual effect? Memory, 19, 529–537.Google Scholar
Engel de Abreu, P. M. A., Cruz-Santos, A., Tourinho, C. J., Martin, R., & Bialystok, E. (2012). Bilingualism enriches the poor: Enhanced cognitive control in low-income minority children. Psychological Science, 23, 1364–1371.Google Scholar
Garon, N., Bryson, S. E., & Smith, I. M. (2008). Executive function in preschoolers: A review using an integrative framework. Psychological Bulletin, 134, 31–60.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gathercole, V. C. M., Thomas, E. M., Jones, L., Viñas-Guasch, N., Young, N., & Hughes, E. K. (2010). Cognitive effects of bilingualism: Digging deeper for the contributions of language dominance, linguistic knowledge, socioeconomic status, and cognitive abilities. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13, 617–664.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gerhardstein, P., & Rovee-Collier, C. (2002). The development of visual search in infants and very young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 81, 194–215.Google Scholar
Green, D. W. (1998). Mental control of the bilingual lexico-semantic system. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1, 67–81.Google Scholar
Hilchey, M. D., & Klein, R. M. (2011). Are there bilingual advantages on nonlinguistic interference tasks? Implications for the plasticity of executive control processes. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18, 625–658.Google Scholar
Hughes, C., & Ensor, R. (2005). Executive function and theory of mind in 2-year-olds: A family affair? Developmental Neuropsychology. 28, 645–668.Google Scholar
Jared, D., & Kroll, J. F. (2001). Do bilinguals activate phonological representations in one or both of their languages when naming words? Journal of Memory and Language, 44, 2–31.Google Scholar
Kochanska, G., Murray, K. T., & Harlan, E. T. (2000). Effortful control in early childhood: Continuity and change, antecedents, and implications for social development. Developmental Psychology, 6, 220–232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kovács, A. M., & Mehler, J. (2009). Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 6556–6560.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Majdandžić, M., & van den Boom, D. C. (2007). Multimethod longitudinal assessment of temperament in early childhood. Journal of Personality, 75, 121–168.Google Scholar
Manly, T., Robertson, I. H., Anderson, V., & Nimmo-Smith, I. (1998). Test of Everyday Attention for Children. London, England: Pearson Assessment.Google Scholar
Martin-Rhee, M. M., & Bialystok, E. (2008). The development of two types of inhibitory control in monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language & Cognition, 11, 81–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mayo, A., & Leseman, P. P. M. (2006). Vragenlijst dagelijkse communicatie [Daily Communication Questionnaire]. Unpublished questionnaire.Google Scholar
Mezzacappa, E. (2004). Alerting, orienting, and executive attention: Developmental properties and sociodemographic correlates in an epidemiological sample of young, urban children. Child Development, 75, 1373–1386.Google Scholar
Morales, J., Calvo, A., & Bialystok, E. (2013). Working memory development in monolingual and bilingual children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 114, 187–202.Google Scholar
Morton, J. B., & Harper, S. N. (2007). What did Simon say? Revisiting the bilingual advantage. Developmental Science, 6, 719–726.Google Scholar
Mulder, H., Hoofs, H., Verhagen, J., Veen, I. van der., & Leseman, P. P. M. (2014). Psychometric properties and convergent validity of an executive function test battery for 2-year-olds using item response theory. Frontiers in Psychology, section Developmental Psychology, 5, 733.Google Scholar
Oller, D. K., & Eilers, R. E. (2002). Language and literacy in bilingual children. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Peake, P., Hebl, M., & Mischel, W. (2002). Strategic attention deployment for delay of gratification in working and waiting situations. Developmental Psychology, 38, 313–326.Google Scholar
Pearson, B. Z., Fernández, S. C., & Oller, D. K. (1993). Lexical development in bilingual infants and toddlers: Comparison to monolingual norms. Language Learning, 43, 93–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poarch, G., & van Hell, J. (2012). Executive functions and inhibitory control in multilingual children: Evidence from second-language learners, bilinguals, and trilinguals. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 113, 535–551.Google Scholar
Poulin-Dubois, D., Blaye, A., Coutya, J., & Bialystok, E. (2011). The effects of bilingualism on toddlers’ executive functioning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 108, 567–579.Google Scholar
Scerif, G., Cornish, K., Wilding, J., Driver, J., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (2004). Visual search in typically developing toddlers and toddlers with Fragile X or Williams syndrome. Developmental Science, 7, 116–130.Google Scholar
Scheele, A. F., Leseman, P. P. M., & Mayo, A. Y. (2010). The home language environment of mono- and bilingual children and their language proficiency. Applied Psycholinguistics, 31, 117–140.Google Scholar
Soveri, A., Rodriguez-Fornells, A., & Laine, M. (2011). Is there a relationship between language switching and executive functions in bilingualism? Introducing a within group analysis approach. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 1–8.Google Scholar
Vega, C., & Fernandez, M. (2011). Errors on the WCST correlate with language proficiency scores in Spanish-English bilingual children. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 26, 158–164.Google Scholar
Verhagen, J., De Bree, E. H., Boom, J., Mulder, H., & Leseman, P. P. M. (2014). Relationships between nonword repetition and vocabulary in Dutch-speaking children. Poster presented at the XIX Biennal International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS), Germany: Berlin.Google Scholar
Willoughby, M. T., Blair, C. B., Wirth, R. J., & Greenberg, M. (2010). The measurement of executive function at age 3 years: Psychometric properties and criterion validity of a new battery of tasks. Psychological Assessment, 22, 306–317.Google Scholar
Woumans, E., Ceuleers, E., & Duyck, W. (2013). Language control influences cognitive Control: The effect of language switching and interpreting. Paper presented at the Workshop on Neurobilingualism. The Netherlands: Groningen.Google Scholar
Zelazo, P. D., Frye, D., & Rapus, T. (1996). An age-related dissociation between knowing rules and using them. Cognitive Development, 11, 37–63.Google Scholar