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Comprehension of complex sentences with misleading cues in monolingual and bilingual children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2021

Sarvenaz Ostadghafour  and
Ellen Bialystok Open the ORCID record for Ellen Bialystok [Opens in a new window]
Sarvenaz Ostadghafour
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, York University, M3J 1P3Toronto, ON, Canada
Ellen Bialystok*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, York University, M3J 1P3Toronto, ON, Canada
*
*Corresponding author. Email: ellenb@yorku.ca
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Abstract

Bilingual children typically perform more poorly than monolingual children on linguistic tasks but better than monolingual children on cognitive tasks requiring executive function. The present study examined performance on complex linguistic tasks that also required executive functioning for their solution. One hundred 4-year-olds from linguistically diverse backgrounds (36 monolinguals, 64 bilinguals) performed two linguistic tasks in which misleading information needed to be ignored to select the correct answer. Data were analyzed both categorically by comparing the performance of children assigned to monolingual and bilingual groups and continuously in terms of degree of bilingual experience across the entire sample. In the categorical analyses, bilingual children were more accurate than monolingual children in understanding the meaning of spoken sentences in the presence of distraction in both tasks, and continuous analyses showed that performance was calibrated to degree of bilingualism in one of the tasks, with higher levels of bilingualism being associated with better performance. The interpretation is that attentional control built up through bilingual experience compensates for lower levels of language proficiency in performing these complex linguistic tasks. The study also endorses the use of continuous assessments of bilingualism rather than categorical assignment to groups to obtain more nuanced results.

Keywords

bilingualismexecutive functionattentional ControlSentence comprehensionVocabulary
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 42 , Issue 5 , September 2021 , pp. 1117 - 1134
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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