Bilingual and Bicultural: Executive Function in Korean and American Children

The bilingual advantage hypothesis proposes that bilingual children will display greater executive function (EF) skills compared to their monolingual peers. However, most research on this topic neglects to include monolingual children from both language groups for comparison, thus confounding language status and cultural context. To address this gap, we administered an extensive battery of EF tasks to 189 typically developing children ages 47–95 months (Mage = 71.47, SD = 11.68, 42.9 % Female) drawn from three language status groups: Korean-English Bilingual and English Monolingual (both in the northwestern United States) and Korean Monolingual (South Korea). Korean-English Bilingual children scored significantly higher on the EF composite than Korean Monolingual children, even after controlling for child age and verbal ability. Both English Monolingual and Korean-English Bilingual children waited significantly longer during a delay-of-gratification task than Korean Monolingual children when controlling for age and verbal ability. Korean-English Bilingual children outperformed English Monolingual and Korean Monolingual children on the Comprehensive Test of Nonverbal Intelligence. There were no significant differences between language status groups on the other individual EF tasks after adjusting for multiple comparisons. Taken together, we did not find consistent support for a bilingual advantage in EF skills: Country of residence also played a role, with children living in the United States outperforming children living in Korea in some cases.