The relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive control skills in bilingual children from low socio-economic backgrounds

Abstract

The present study examined whether linguistic cognitive control skills were related to non-linguistic cognitive control skills in monolingual children (Study 1) and in bilingual childrenfrom low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds (Study 2). Linguistic inhibitory control wasmeasured using a grammaticality judgment (GJ) task in which children judged thegrammaticality of sentences while ignoring their meaning. Non-linguistic inhibitory control wasmeasured using a flanker task. Study 1, in which we tested monolingual English-speakingchildren, revealed that better inhibitory control skills, as indexed by the performance on theflanker task, were associated with improved performance on the GJ task. Study 2, in which wetested bilingual English-Spanish speaking children from low SES backgrounds, revealed thatbetter non-linguistic inhibitory control skills did not yield better performance on the GJ task.Together, these findings point to a role of domain-general attention mechanisms in languageperformance in typically developing monolingual children, but not in bilingual children from lowSES. Present results suggest that the relationship between linguistic and domain-generalcognitive-control abilities is instantiated differently in bilingual vs. monolingual children, andthat language-EF interactions are sensitive to language status and SES.