Bilingualism and the Development of Executive Function: The Role of Attention

Child Development Perspectives

Volumn 9, Issue 2, 2015, Pages 117-121

  Bialystok, Ellen ^a  

^a YORK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

Attention; Bilingualism; Cognitive development; Executive function; Infancy

Indexed keywords

EID: 84928583024     PISSN: 17508592     EISSN: 17508606     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/cdep.12116     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. Saer, D. J. (1923). The effects of bilingualism on intelligence. British Journal of Psychology, 14, 25-38.
2. Goodenough, F. L. (1926). Racial differences in the intelligence of school children. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 9, 388-397.
3. Peal, E., & Lambert, W. (1962). The relation of bilingualism to intelligence. Psychological Monographs, 76, 1-23.
4. Dunabeitia, J. A., Hernandez, J. A., Anton, E., Macizo, P., Estevez, A., Fuentes, L. J., & Carreiras, M. (2014). The inhibitory advantage in bilingual children revisited: Myth or reality? Experimental Psychology, 61, 234-251.
5. Kroll, J. F., & Bialystok, E. (2013). Understanding the consequences of bilingualism for language processing and cognition. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 25, 497-514.
6. Goldin-Meadow, S., Levine, S. C., Hedges, L. V., Huttenlocher, J., Raudenbush, S. W., & Small, S. L. (2014). New evidence about language and cognitive development based on a longitudinal study: Hypotheses for intervention. American Psychologist, 69, 588-599.
7. Galambos, S. J., & Hakuta, K. (1988). Subject-specific and task-specific characteristics of metalinguistic awareness in bilingual children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 9, 141-162.
8. Bialystok, E. (1986). Factors in the growth of linguistic awareness. Child Development, 57, 498-510.
9. Barac, R., Bialystok, E., Castro, D. C., & Sanchez, M. (2014). The cognitive development of young dual language learners: A critical review. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 29, 699-714.
10. Adesope, O. O., Lavin, T., Thompson, T., & Ungerleider, C. (2010). A systematic review and meta-analysis of the cognitive correlates of bilingualism. Review of Educational Research, 80, 207-245.
11. Kroll, J. F., Bobb, S. C., & Hoshino, N. (2014). Two languages in mind: Bilingualism as a tool to investigate language, cognition, and the brain. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23, 159-163.
12. Best, J. R., Miller, P. H., & Naglieri, J. A. (2011). Relations between executive function and academic achievement from ages 5 to 17 in a large, representative national sample. Learning and Individual Differences, 21, 327-336.
13. Duncan, G. J., Ziol-Guest, K. M., & Kalil, A. (2010). Early childhood poverty and adult attainment, behavior, and health. Child Development, 81, 306-325.
14. Miyake, A., & Friedman, N. P. (2012). The nature and organization of individual differences in executive functions: Four general conclusions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21, 8-14.
15. Miyake, A., Friedman, N. P., Emerson, M. J., Witzki, A. H., Howerter, A., & Wager, T. D. (2000). The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex "frontal lobe" tasks: A latent variable analysis. Cognitive Psychology, 41, 49-100.
16. 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 and Review, 18, 625-658.
17. Bialystok, E. (2010). Global-local and trail-making tasks by monolingual and bilingual children: Beyond inhibition. Developmental Psychology, 46, 93-105.
18. Carlson, S. M., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2008). Bilingual experience and executive functioning in young children. Developmental Science, 11, 282-298.
19. Rueda, M. R., Fan, J., McCandliss, B. D., Halparin, J. D., Gruber, D. B., Lercari, L. P., & Posner, M. I. (2004). Development of attentional networks in childhood. Neuropsychologia, 42, 1029-1040.
20. Kapa, L. L., & Colombo, J. (2013). Attentional control in early and later bilingual children. Cognitive Development, 28, 233-246.
21. Costa, A., Hernandez, M., & Sebastian-Galles, N. (2008). Bilingualism aids conflict resolution: Evidence from the ANT task. Cognition, 106, 59-86.
22. Costa, A., Hernandez, A., Costa-Faidella, J., & Sebastian-Galles, N. (2009). On the bilingual advantage in conflict processing: Now you see it, now you don't. Cognition, 113, 135-149.
23. Zelazo, P. D., Frye, D., & Rapus, T. (1996). An age-related dissociation between knowing rules and using them. Cognitive Development, 11, 37-63.
24. Bialystok, E. (1999). Cognitive complexity and attentional control in the bilingual mind. Child Development, 70, 636-644.
25. Okanda, M., Moriguchi, Y., & Itakura, S. (2010). Language and cognitive shifting: Evidence from young monolingual and bilingual children. Psychological Reports, 107, 68-78.
26. Engel de Abreu, P. M. (2011). Working memory in multilingual children: Is there a bilingual effect? Memory, 19, 529-537.
27. Blom, E., Kuntay, A. C., Messer, M., Verhagen, J., & Leseman, P. (2014). The benefits of being bilingual: Working memory in bilingual Turkish-Dutch children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 128C, 105-119.
28. Bialystok, E., Poarch, G., Luo, L., & Craik, F. I. M. (2014). Effects of bilingualism and aging on executive function and working memory. Psychology and Aging, 29, 696-705.
29. Carlson, S. M., & Moses, L. J. (2001). Individual differences in inhibitory control and children's theory of mind. Child Development, 72, 1032-1053.
30. Wellman, H. M., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind development: The truth about false belief. Child Development, 72, 655-684.
31. Goetz, P. (2003). The effects of bilingualism on theory of mind development. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 1-15.
32. Kovacs, A. M. (2009). Early bilingualism enhances mechanisms of false-belief reasoning. Developmental Science, 12, 48-54.
33. Rubio-Fernandez, P., & Glucksberg, S. (2012). Reasoning about other people's beliefs: Bilinguals have an advantage. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 38, 211-217.
34. Adi-Japha, E., Berberich-Artzi, J., & Libnawi, A. (2010). Cognitive flexibility in drawings of bilingual children. Child Development, 81, 1356-1366.
35. Bialystok, E., & Shapero, D. (2005). Ambiguous benefits: The effect of bilingualism on reversing ambiguous figures. Developmental Science, 8, 595-604.
36. Wimmer, M. C., & Marx, C. (2014). Inhibitory processes in visual perception: A bilingual advantage. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 126, 412-419.
37. Greenberg, A., Bellana, B., & Bialystok, E. (2013). Perspective-taking ability in bilingual children: Extending advantages in executive control to spatial reasoning. Cognitive Development, 28, 41-50.
38. Beauvillain, C., & Grainger, J. (1987). Accessing interlexical homographs: Some limitations of a language-selective access. Journal of Memory and Language, 26, 658-672.
39. 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.
40. Martin, C. D., Dering, B., Thomas, E. M., & Thierry, G. (2009). Brain potentials reveal semantic priming in both the "active" and the "non-attended" language of early bilinguals. NeuroImage, 47, 326-333.
41. Rodriguez-Fornells, A., Rotte, M., Heinze, H.-J., Nosselt, T. M., & Munte, T. F. (2002). Brain potential and functional MRI evidence for how to handle two languages with one brain. Nature, 415, 1026-1029.
42. Sullivan, M. D., Janus, M., Moreno, S., Astheimer, L. B., & Bialystok, E. (2014). Early stage second-language learning improves executive control: Evidence from ERP. Brain and Language, 139, 84-98.
43. Fernandez, M., Tartar, J. L., Padron, D., & Acosta, J. (2013). Neurophysiological marker of inhibition distinguishes language groups on a non-linguistic executive function test. Brain and Cognition, 83, 330-336.
44. Moreno, S., Wodniecka, Z., Tays, W., Alain, C., & Bialystok, E. (2014). Inhibitory control in bilinguals and musicians: Event related potential (ERP) evidence for experience-specific effects. PLoS ONE, 9, e94169.
45. Bialystok, E., & Barac, R. (2012). Emerging bilingualism: Dissociating advantages for metalinguistic awareness and executive control. Cognition, 122, 67-73.
46. 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.
47. Kovacs, A. M., & Mehler, J. (2009). Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106, 6556-6560.
48. Singh, L., Fu, C. S., Rahman, A. A., Hameed, W. B., Sanmugam, S., Agarwal, P., ... the GUSTO Research Team. (2015). Back to basics: A bilingual advantage in visual habituation. Child Development, 86, 294-302.
49. Sebastian-Galles, N., Albareda-Castellot, B., Weikum, W. M., & Werker, J. F. (2012). A bilingual advantage in visual language discrimination in infancy. Psychological Science, 23, 994-999.
50. Weikum, W. M., Vouloumanos, A., Navarra, J., Soto-Faraco, S., Sebastian-Galles, N., & Werker, J. F. (2007). Visual language discrimination in infancy. Science, 316, 1159.