Reassessing the bilingual advantage in theory of mind and its cognitive underpinnings

Bilingualism

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2014, Pages 396-409

  Nguyen, Thien Kim ^a   Astington, Janet Wilde ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

bilingualism; cognitive inhibition; executive function; theory of mind; working memory

Indexed keywords

EID: 84902170526     PISSN: 13667289     EISSN: 14691841     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1366728913000394     Document Type: Article

References (83)

1. Abu-Rabia, S., & Siegel, L. S. (2002). Reading, syntactic, orthographic, and working memory skills of bilingual Arabic-English speaking Canadian children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 31, 661-678.
2. Ardila, A., Rosselli, M.,Matute, E., & Guajardo, S. (2005). The influence of the parents' education level on the development of executive functions. Developmental Neuropsychology, 28, 539-560.
3. Astington, J. W. (2000). Language and metalanguage in children's understanding of mind. In J. W. Astington (ed.), Minds in the making: Essays in honor of David R. Olson, pp. 267-284. Oxford: Blackwell.
4. Baddeley, A. (2000). The episodic buffer: A new component in working memory Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 417-423.
5. Berguno, G., & Bowler, D. M. (2004). Communicative interactions, knowledge of a second language, and theory of mind in young children. The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 165, 293-309.
6. Bialystok, E. (1997). Effects of bilingualism and biliteracy on children's emerging concepts of print. Developmental Psychology, 33, 429-440.
7. Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in development: Language, literacy, and cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
8. Bialystok, E. (2009a). Bilingualism: The good, the bad, and the indifferent. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12, 3-11.
9. Bialystok, E. (2009b). Claiming evidence from non-evidence: A reply to Morton and Harper. Developmental Science, 12, 499-501.
10. Bialystok, E. (2010). Global-local and trail-making tasks by monolingual and bilingual children: Beyond inhibition. Developmental Psychology, 46, 93-105.
11. Bialystok, E., Barac, R., Blaye, A., & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2010). Word mapping and executive functioning in young monolingual and bilingual children. Journal of Cognition and Development, 11, 485-508.
12. Bialystok, E., & Codd, J. (1997). Cardinal limits: Evidence from language awareness and bilingualism for developing concepts of number. Cognitive Development, 12, 85-106.
13. Bialystok, E., & Feng, X. (2009). Language proficiency and executive control in proactive interference: Evidence from monolingual and bilingual children and adults. Brain and Language, 109, 93-100.
14. Bialystok, E., Luk, G., Peets, K. F., & Yang, S. (2010). Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 525-531.
15. Bialystok, E., & Martin, M. M. (2004). Attention and inhibition in bilingual children: Evidence from the Dimensional Change Card Sort task. Developmental Science, 7, 325-339.
16. Bialystok, E., & Senman, L. (2004). Executive processes in appearance-reality tasks: The role of inhibition of attention and symbolic representation. Child Development, 75, 562-579.
17. Bialystok, E., & Shapero, D. (2005). Ambiguous benefits: The effect of bilingualism on reversing ambiguous figures. Developmental Science, 8, 595-604.
18. Carlson, S. M., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2008). Bilingual experience and executive functioning in young children. Developmental Science, 11, 282-298.
19. Carlson, S. M., & Moses, L. J. (2001). Individual differences in inhibitory control and children's theory of mind. Child Development, 72, 1032-1053.
20. Carlson, S. M.,Moses,L. J.,&Breton, C. (2002).Howspecific is the relation between executive function and theory of mind Contribution of inhibitory control and working memory. Infant and Child Development, 11, 73-92.
21. Chan,K. T. (2004). Chinese-English bilinguals' theory-of-mind development. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto.
22. Chee, M. W. L. (2006).Dissociating language andwordmeaning in the bilingual brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 527-529.
23. Cowan, N., Elliott, E. M., Saults, J. S., Morey, C. C., Mattox, S., Hismjatullina, A., & Conway, A. R. A. (2005). On the capacity of attention: Its estimation and its role in working memory and cognitive aptitudes. Cognitive Psychology, 51, 42-100.
24. Crinion, J., Turner, R., Grogan, A., Hanawaka, T., Noppeney, U., Devlin, J. T., Aso, T.,Urayama, S., Fukuyama,H., Stockton, K., Usui, K., Green, D.W., & Price, C. J. (2006). Language control in the bilingual brain. Science, 312, 1537-1540.
25. Cromdal, J. (1999). Childhood bilingualism and metalinguistic skills: Analysis and control in young Swedish-English bilinguals. Applied Psycholinguistics, 20, 1-20.
26. Cutting, A. L., & Dunn, J. (1999). Theory of mind, emotion understanding, language, and family background: Individual differences and interrelations. Child Development, 70, 853-865.
27. da Fontoura, H. A., & Siegel, L. S. (1995). Reading, syntactic, and working memory skills of bilingual Portuguese-English Canadian children. Reading and Writing, 7, 139-153.
28. Davis, H. L., & Pratt, C. (1995). The development of children's theory of mind: The working memory explanation. Australian Journal of Psychology, 47, 25-31.
29. deVilliers, J. (1999). Language and theory ofmind: What are the developmental relationships In S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg & D. J. Cohen (eds.), Understanding other minds: Perspectives from autism and developmental neuroscience, pp. 83-123. New York: Oxford University Press.
30. Dunn, L. M., & Dunn, L. M. (1997). Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Third Edition (PPVT-III). Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service.
31. Dunn, L. M., Thériault-Walen, C. M., & Dunn, L. M. (1993). Échelle de Vocabulaire en Images Peabody. Toronto, ON: Psycan.
32. Engle, R. W. (2010). Role of working memory capacity in cognitive control. Current Anthropology, 51, S17-S26.
33. Feng, X., Diamond, A., & Bialystok, E. (2007). Manipulating information in working memory: An advantage for bilinguals. Presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Boston, MA.
34. Friedman, N. P., & Miyake, A. (2004). The relations among inhibition and interference control functions: A latentvariable analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 133, 101-135.
35. Gerstadt, C. L., Hong, Y. J., & Diamond, A. (1994). The relationship between cognition and action: Performance of 3-7 years old children on a Stroop-like day-night test. Cognition, 53, 129-153.
36. Goetz, P. J. (2003). The effects of bilingualism on theory ofmind development. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 1-15.
37. Gopnik, A.,&Astington, J. W. (1988). Children's understanding of representational change and its relation to the understanding of false belief and the appearance-reality distinction. Child Development, 59, 26-37.
38. Gordon, A. C. L., & Olson, D. R. (1998). The relation between acquisition of a theory of mind and the capacity to hold in mind. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 68, 70-83.
39. Gutiérrez-Clellen, V. F., Calderón, J., & Weismer, S. E. (2004). Verbal working memory in bilingual children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 47, 863-876.
40. Hakuta, K. (1986). Mirror of language: The debate on bilingualism. New York: Basic Books.
41. Hala, S., Hug, S., & Henderson, A. (2003). Executive function and false-belief understanding in preschool children: Two tasks are harder than one. Journal of Cognition and Development, 4, 275-298.
42. Halford, G. S. (1993). Children's understanding: The development of mental models. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
43. Happé, F. G. E. (1995). The role of age and verbal ability in the theory of mind task performance of subjects with autism. Child Development, 66, 843-855.
44. Holmes, H. A., Black, C., & Miller, S. A. (1996). A cross-task comparison of false belief understanding in a Head Start population. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 63, 263-285.
45. Hughes, C., & Ensor, R. (2005). Executive function and theory of mind in 2-year-olds: A family affair Developmental Neuropsychology, 28, 645-668.
46. Hughes, C.,&Ensor,R. (2007). Executive function and theory of mind: Predictive relations from ages 2 to 4. Developmental Psychology, 43, 1447-1459.
47. Kaushanskaya, M., & Marian, V. (2007). Bilingual language processing and interference in bilinguals: Evidence from eye tracking and picture naming. Language Learning, 57, 119-163.
48. Keenan, T. (1998). Memory span as a predictor of false-belief understanding. New Zealand Journal of Psychology, 27, 36-43.
49. Keenan, T., Olson, D. R.,&Marini, Z. (1998).Working memory and children's developing understanding of the mind. Australian Journal of Psychology, 50, 76-82.
50. Kloo, D., Perner, J., & Giritzer, T. (2010). Object-based setshifting in preschoolers: Relations to theory of mind. In B. W. Sokol, U. Müller, J. I. M. Carpendale, A. R. Young & G. Iarocci (eds.), Self and social regulation: Social interaction and the development of social understanding and executive functions, pp. 193-217. New York: Oxford University Press.
51. Kovács, A. M. (2009). Early bilingualism enhances mechanisms of false-belief reasoning. Developmental Science, 12, 48-54.
52. Kroll, J. F., Bobb, S. C., & Wodniecka, Z. (2006). Language selectivity is the exception, not the rule: Arguments against a fixed locus of language selection in bilingual speech. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9, 119-135.
53. Mahon, M., & Crutchley, A. (2006). Performance of typicallydeveloping school-age children with English as an additional language on the British Picture Vocabulary Scales II. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 22, 333-353.
54. Marian, V., Spivey,M., & Hirsch, J. (2003). Shared and separate systems in bilingual language processing: Converging evidence from eyetracking and brain imaging. Brain and Language, 86, 70-82.
55. Martin-Rhee, M. M., & Bialystok, E. (2008). The development of two types of inhibitory control in monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11, 81-93.
56. 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.
57. Milligan, K., Astington, J. W., & Dack, L. A. (2007). Language and theory of mind: Meta-analysis of the relation between language ability and false-belief understanding. Child Development, 78, 622-646.
58. Morton, J. B., & Harper, S. N. (2007). What did Simon say Revisiting the bilingual advantage. Developmental Science, 10, 719-726.
59. Moses, L. J. (2001). Executive accounts of theory of mind development. Child Development, 72, 688-690.
60. Moses, L. J., & Tahiroglu, D. (2010). Clarifying the relation between executive function and children's theories ofmind. In B. W. Sokol, U. Müller, J. I. M. Carpendale, A. R. Young & G. Iarocci (eds.), Self and social regulation: Social interaction and the development of social understanding and executive functions, pp. 218-233. New York: Oxford University Press.
61. Mutter, B., Alcorn, M. B., & Welsh, M. (2006). Theory of mind and executive function: Working memory capacity and inhibitory control as predictors of false-belief task performance. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 102, 819-835.
62. Namazi,M.,&Thordardottir, E. (2010). Aworkingmemory, not bilingual advantage, in controlled attention. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13, 597-616.
63. Noble, K. G., Norman, M. F., & Farah, M. J. (2005). Neurocognitive correlates of socioeconomic status in kindergarten children. Developmental Science, 8, 74-87.
64. Oller, D. K.,&Eilers, R. E. (eds.) (2002). Language and literacy in bilingual children. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
65. Oller,D. K., Pearson, B. Z.,&Cobo-Lewis, A. B. (2007). Profile effects in early bilingual language and literacy. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 191-230.
66. Oshima-Takane, Y., Guerriero, A. M. S., & Genesee, F. (2006). Language development questionnaire. Unpublished questionnaire, McGill University, Montreal, QC.
67. Peal, E., & Lambert, W. E. (1962). The relation of bilingualism to intelligence. Psychological Monographs, 76 (27, Whole No. 546), 1-23.
68. Perner, J., & Lang, B. (1999). Development of theory of mind and cognitive control. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3, 337-344.
69. Perner, J., Leekam, S. R., & Wimmer, H. (1987). Three-yearolds' difficulty with false belief: The case for a conceptual deficit. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 5, 125-137.
70. Peskin, J., & Ardino, V. (2003). Representing the mental world in children's social behavior: Playing hide-and-seek and keeping a secret. Social Development, 12, 496-512.
71. Preacher,K. J.,&Hayes,A. F. (2004). SPSS and SASprocedures for estimating indirect effects in simple mediation models. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36, 717-731.
72. Preacher, K. J., & Hayes, A. F. (2008). Asymptotic and resampling strategies for assessing and comparing indirect effects in multiple mediator models. Behavior Research Methods, 40, 879-891.
73. Premack, D., &Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1, 515-526.
74. Rodriguez-Fornells, A., Van Der Lugt, A., Rotte, M., Britti, B., Heinze, H.-J., & Munte, T. F. (2005). Second language interferes with word production in fluent bilinguals: Brain potential and functional imaging evidence. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17, 422-433.
75. Russell, J. (1996). Agency: Its role in mental development. Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum.
76. Saer, D. J. (1923). The effects of bilingualism on intelligence. British Journal of Psychology, 14, 25-38.
77. Shatz, M., Diesendruck, G., Martinez-Beck, I., & Akar, D. (2003). The influence of language and socioeconomic status on children's understanding of false belief. Developmental Psychology, 39, 717-729.
78. Wechsler, D. (1991). Manual for the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Third Edition (WISC-III). San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation.
79. Wellman, H. M., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory of mind development: The truth about falsebelief. Child Development, 72, 655-684.
80. Welsh, M. C., Pennington, B. F., & Groisser, D. B. (1991). A normative-developmental study of executive function: A window on prefrontal function in children. Developmental Neuropsychology, 7, 131-149.
81. Wimmer, H., & Mayringer, H. (1998). False-belief understanding in young children: Explanations do not develop before predictions. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 22, 403-422.
82. Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. Cognition, 13, 103-128.
83. Zelazo, P. D., Frye, D., & Rapus, T. (1996). An age-related dissociation between knowing rules and using them. Cognitive Development, 11, 37-63.