An Exploratory Study Of Multilingual Learning Experience And The Relationship Of Executive Functions

It has been a heatedly debated issue in psycholinguistics in the past several decades that in what aspects and to what extent learning more than one language could influence language learners’ executive functions.The previous research addressing the issue yielded opposite results indicating bilingual disadvantages and bilingual advantages.However,very few studies have examined the cumulative effect obtained from the number of languages one experienced on his or her executive functions,still fewer studies have explored the relationship between language kinship and cognitive functions.This exploratory study aimed to deal with the above issues by answering the following three questions.Is language proficiency an influencing factor of executive functions among the subject groups? Could the number of languages the learners exposed to be taken as an influencing factor to explain the discrepancy in the cognitive performances of the subject groups? Is language kinship an influencing factor of executive functions,i.e.compared with the languages that belong to different language families,would the languages belonging to the same language family lead to better executive functions?The study employed the framework of the Unity and Diversity theory of Miyake et al.(2000),and the three sub-components of executive functions were tested by three experimental tasks: the Stroop task measuring inhibitory control,the N-back task measuring working memory,and the More-odd Shifting task measuring shifting.The tasks were conducted on 76 Han,Wa,and Dai college students who were divided into four different language groups: 20 Chinese monolinguals,20 Chinese-English bilinguals,19 Wa-Chinese-English trilinguls,and17 Dai-Chinese-English trilinguls.The independent variables in the current study were the subjects’ language proficiency,language number,and language kinship.Correspondingly,the three sub-components of executive functions: inhibition,working memory and shifting were used as dependent variables.One-way ANOVA and post hoc multiple comparison of the data found significant Stroop effect in inhibition and significant differences in working memory,but no significant differences were found in shifting.In other words,the results indicated that the number of languages one was exposed to had a cumulative effect on the subjects’ inhibitory control and working memory,and language kinship showed a certain degree of cognitive advantage in working memory.The results also suggested that bilingual advantage exhibited in those cognitive tasks was more obvious for speakers whose languages were more linguistically closer such as Dai-Chinese-English trilinguals than those speakers who held a relatively longer language distance,such as Wa-Chinese-English trilinguals.However,unlike language number and language kinship,language proficiency had no influence on any of the three sub-components of executive functions.In summary,based on the above results,conclusions could be drawn that multilingual learning experience exhibited a positive effect on individuals’ inhibition and working memory,while its influence on shifting was not significant.Based on the above results,the thesis proved the possible influence of multilingual learning experience on the development of individual’s executive functions from practice,which would provide some implications for the follow-up researches.