The Difference Study Of Executive Functions Of University Students Who Have Different Bilingual Experience

Executive functions are closely involved in the acquisition of language experience.Especially,the relationship between language experience and executive functions has become one of the significant study topics in psychological and educational fields.Those who have bilingual experience are called bilinguals.Chinese students have been learning Chinese and English since they are young;therefore,for most Chinese students,Chinese is their first language and English becomes their second language;thus,most Chinese students have bilingual experience.Even thought those students are learning at least two languages at the same time,the development abilities and levels are distinguishable according to different students.In Chinese universities,though most students(especially junior students)continuously study two languages,but they seldom use them.For English major students,they encounter English everyday and are actually using the second language they are learning,.Thus we are fully convinced that their English experience is widely more than those who are non English majors.Is there any influence of diverse language experience on the development of their executive functions? Hence,this is what our study try to investigate through experimental methods.our study chose non English major students who did not pass CET 4(College English Level 4)which are defined as ?the group with more bilingual experience?and those who passed TEM 8(Test For English Majors 8)as participants,which are defined as ?the group with less bilingual experience?,referred to the Model of executive functions mentioned by Miyake,who concluded that executive functions include three most basic and critical sub-functions: inhibitory control,memory update and attention shift and adopted nine tasks including Stroop,Simon,Stop-signal,Keep-track,Letter-memory,Tone-monitoring,Plus-minus,Number-letter and Local-global to separately study the differences of the three sub-functions of the two groups of participants and therefore investigate whether bilingual experience has an important impact on executive functions.The results of the study indicated that the group with more bilingual experience show bilingual advantages in all three sub-functions(inhibitory control,memory update and attention shift),which supported bilingual advantage study results of other researchers and scholars.