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Comparative Study Of Executive Control Components Between Early And Late Bilingual Children

Posted on:2021-01-21Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:M XiaoFull Text:PDF
GTID:2415330647955235Subject:Applied Psychology
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Previous work has suggest that bilinguals have an advantage over monolinguals,not only in linguistic tasks,but also in non-linguistic tasks involving executive control.Such findings undoubtedly point to the executive function benefits of bilingual experience.Therefore,the present study compares bilingual children with different ways of acquiring bilingualism,with the primary goal of determining which aspects of executive control are sensitive to bilingual experience.The study used a behavioral version of the antisaccade task,celled the‘face task',adapted and developed by Bialystok,Craik,& Ryan.This task isolate the components of executive function by setting up different experimental conditions.We therefore examined differences between early and late bilingual children in the three components of executive control:response inhibition,interference inhibition,and cognitive flexibility,and in which component of executive functioning is enhanced in bilingual children,and whether bilingual experience is responsible for the enhancement of executive functioning.Thirty early bilingual children who grew up in Chinese and Mongolian language from birth and their home environment was bilingual,another groupof 30 late bilingual children who were exposed to second language after school.The hypothesized was that bilingualism enhances each of these processes because of their role in managing two language systems.The early bilingual children would have an advantage in executive control and that this would be demonstrated in each of the executive control components.We therefore predicted that early bilingual children would perform more efficiently in each of the experimental conditions,producing smaller suppression costs,smaller inhibitory control costs,and smaller task-switching costs than comparable late bilingual children.The results verified an advantageous effect of cognitive executive control in early bilingual children.A comparison of the experimental conditions between the two groups showed that the cost of response inhibition and the cost of interference inhibition were significantly lower in the early bilingual group than in the late bilingual children,indicating that the early bilingual children were able to control the cognitive load caused by habitual responses and interference from irrelevant information more effectively.The results for the task-switching showed that,although early bilinguals did not show a significant advantage in the gaze shift task,in the straight eyes task,early bilinguals adapted to changes in task patterns significantly better than late bilinguals,at a lower cost and with a smoother switching process.In particular,there was no difference between the early bilingual group's responses to mixed and single blocks,which was close to zero cost switching.In the gaze shift task,wheretask difficulty escalated,switching costs increased for both groups,and although the early bilingual group had lower costs than the late bilingual group for switching responses,there was no significant difference between the two groups.However,when comparing the responses of the two groups in each condition,the early bilingual children's response speed was significantly faster than the late bilingual group's,except for the green eyes in a single block,in which there was no significant difference between the two groups.It can be hypothesized that the bilingual switch experience can facilitate individual response inhibition and inhibitory control as well as cognitive flexibility.Therefore,the results validate the idea that bilingual experience can enhance executive control.
Keywords/Search Tags:early and late bilingual, executive control, response inhibition, interference inhibition, task switching
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