Executive function skills of emergent bilingual primary-school children in Wales

Abstract

It has been widely suggested in recent years that exposure to and use of multiple languages can affect cognitive performance, with bilinguals frequently being argued to demonstrate superior cognitive performance to their monolingual peers. The current study investigates whether there are any effects of minimal exposure to second-language (L2) Welsh on the cognitive skills of English-speaking emergent bilingual primary school children in Wales. Participants were divided into two language groups based on their school year, with performance between monolingual ( N  = 25) and emergent bilingual ( N  = 38) children compared on a variety of executive function (EF) tasks. Results revealed superior performance for the bilingual children in Reception and Year 1 on all EF tasks aside from the Forward digit recall compared to monolingual peers, with no differences between groups in Year 2. This suggests that the cognitive benefits of bilingualism emerge at very early stages of second-language exposure.