Do Bilingual Turkish-Dutch Children Show Working Memory Benefits despite Lower Linguistic Proficiency?

Abstract

Many studies have shown that bilingualism can enhance children's cognitive development (Adesope, Lavin, Thompson, & Ungerleider, 2010; Barac & Bialystok, 2011; Hilchey & Klein, 2011). For the present study we investigated whether emerging bilingual Turkish-Dutch children with varying levels of Turkish and Dutch also benefit from being bilingual. While most research has focused on bilingual children's advantages in inhibition, the present study examined working memory (Bialystok, 2010; Morales, Calvo, & Bialystok, 2013). There are reasons to suspect that cognitive enhancements brought about by bilingualism go beyond inhibitory control and include the domain-general executive attention processes (Engle, Tuholsky, Laughlin, & Conway. 1999). Indeed, inhibitory control is only one of the three core components of executive control proposed by Miyake, Friedman, Emerson, Witzki, Howerter, and Wager (2001) that also include mental shifting and working memory. Our expectation was that the bilingual Turkish-Dutch children would perform lower on language tasks compared to monolingual Dutch age peers due to their specific bilingual learning context. However, we expected them to outperform the monolingual controls on tasks assessing visuospatial and verbal working memory. Adapted from the source document