A Study On The Differences Of Bilingual And Monolingual Children In Coordinated Executive Function

As bilingualism becomes more and more popular, the public cognition towards language has extended, from only taking it as a media of communication to gradually realizing its great function in a higher level of rational cognition. Many linguists and psychologists have adopted the influence of language on the cognitive function as the best connection among interdisciplinary studies. Most of previous studies in this field focus on discussing either the mechanism of language generation or the mechanism of second language acquisition. However, fewer empirical studies have been carried out in China to discuss the influence of language on the executive function or, to indicate that language does exert greater influence on executive function by comparing the differences of bilingual and monolingual children in cognitive executive function. Therefore, this study will choose the influence of language on the executive function as a point of entry, extend the influence of language on the single executive function to the overall coordination of executive function through comparing and analyzing the experimental data obtained in the visual task, audio task, visual-audio dual task, and finally come to the conclusion that differences exist in executive function coordination between bilingual and monolingual children.Experiment Ⅰ is visual task. Both bilingual and monolingual children are required to complete the single task respectively and no significant difference has been found between bilingual and monolingual children in their performance by comparing experimental results. Experiment Ⅱ is audio task and no significant difference has been found, either. Experiment Ⅲ is visual-audio dual task, which is divided into two sub-experiments:sub-experiment (ⅰ) with visual task as primary and audio task as secondary and sub-experiment (ⅱ) with audio task as primary and visual task as secondary. Through comparing their performance in two different sub-experiments, it has been found that bilingual children have better performance in the visual-audio dual task compared with monolingual children, even better under unbalanced visual and audio stimulation.These results suggest that, the performances between bilingual and monolingual children are even when the single task is involved, as it can’t trigger the advantage of bilingual children in the executive function; and bilingual children have better performance overall compared with monolingual children when the dual task is involved, and even better with the coordination of executive function under unbalanced visual and audio stimulation. This study supports the mechanism assumption that differences exist in the coordination of executive function between bilingual and monolingual children.