Bilingual preschoolers show stronger inhibitory control
For students in preschool, speaking two languages may be better than one, especially for developing inhibitory control -- the ability to stop a hasty reflexive response and instead select a more adaptive response.That idea isn't new, but a University of Oregon study took a longitudinal approach to examine the bilingual advantage hypothesis, which suggests that the demands associated with managing two languages confer cognitive advantages that extend beyond the language domain.
The study appeared in the journal Developmental Science.
Researchers looked at a national sample of 1,146 Head Start children who were assessed for their inhibitory control at age 4, and then followed over an 18-month period. The children were divided into three groups based on their language proficiency: Those who spoke only English; those who spoke both Spanish and English; and those who spoke only Spanish at the start of the study but were fluent in both English and Spanish at the follow up assessment.
"At the beginning of the study, the group that entered as already bilingual scored higher on a test of inhibitory control compared to the other two groups," said the study's lead author Jimena Santillán, a UO doctoral student in psychology at the time of the study.
Follow-up assessments came at six and 18 months. Inhibitory control was assessed using a common pencil-tapping task, in which the participant is instructed to tap a pencil on a desk twice when the experimenter taps once, and vice-versa, requiring the student to inhibit the impulse to imitate what the experimenter does and but do the opposite instead. Read more...
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