Effects of Bilingual Language Use and Language Proficiency on 24-month-olds’ Cognitive Control

Abstract

Although a bilingual advantage has been reported for various measures of cognitive control, most previous studies have looked at a limited range of cognitive control measures. Furthermore, they typically leave unaddressed whether positive effects of bilingualism hold for all bilinguals or whether these are modulated by differences in bilingual language use and proficiency of children and their parents. This study reports on tasks of selective attention and inhibitory control from 24-month-old bilinguals (n = 37) and monolinguals (n = 58). Their parents completed a Dutch vocabulary checklist assessing receptive and productive vocabulary as well as questionnaires on children’s attentional focusing, attention shifting and inhibitory control, and language background. Linear mixed-effect regressions showed no differences on cognitive control between the monolinguals and bilingual groups. However, analyses taking into account differences in children’s bilingual language use and proficiency and of their parents revealed a more nuanced picture. Specifically, children’s degree of balanced language usage predicted parent-rated cognitive control. Furthermore, bilingual toddlers who had parents were low proficient in one of the home languages showed significantly better performance on a selective attention task than toddlers whose parents were both proficient in both home languages. These findings suggest that both children’s active usage of two languages and their experience with switching depending on their interlocutor are related to cognitive control performance in young bilingual children. As such, they add to a growing body of evidence that the bilingual advantage in cognitive control is tied to specific conditions of bilingualism, already at a young age.