Multilingual experience and executive functions among children and adolescents in a multilingual city

ABSTRACT

Children develop their language capacities and executive functions (EF) throughout their school-aged years. Research has shown that bilingual children show different patterns of EF performance when compared to their monolingual counterparts. However, it is less clear how variations in children’s multilingual experiences associate with variation in EF performance. The current study examined the variability of multilingual experience across the contexts of home and school and how it relates to EF. Sixty-seven children and adolescents from a multilingual community completed EF tasks that assessed their attention and monitoring. Given the sociolinguistic landscape of a multilingual community, all participants reported having exposure to at least a second language, and their multilingual experience was examined on a continuum across different contexts. Age was positively associated with both attention and monitoring. In addition, the degree of dynamic multilingual experience contributed to performance on monitoring. Our study shows that in children and adolescents, multilingual experience across the contexts of home and school accounted for additional variation in EF beyond chronological age.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingualism
• bilingualism
• executive functions
• children and adolescents
• contextual factors
• multilingual community
• sociolinguistic factors

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-2020-05052) for partial support to the last author, as well as the Fonds de Recherche - Société et Culture (306202) for doctoral research support to the first author. This research was supported by Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music Graduate Stipend to Julie H. J. Oh. Thank you to Erica Pettorelli, Domenico Tullo, and Stephanie Lung for their help with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie H. J. Oh

Julie H. J. Oh is a PhD candidate at the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology at McGill University. She completed her bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of British Columbia. She is part of the Bilingualism Experience Education (BEE) Lab and the Perceptual Neuroscience Laboratory for Autism and Development (PNlab). Her doctoral research focuses on examining reading and cognitive skills in multilingual children and adolescents. She is engaged in both research and clinical work with children and adolescents and plans to become a licenced psychologist.

Armando Bertone

Dr Armando Bertone is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology at McGill University, Canada. He obtained his PhD in Clinical Neuropsychology at l'Université de Montréal. After completing postdoctoral fellowships in the area of applied visual neuroscience (Montreal & McGill), he founded his Perceptual Neuroscience Lab (PNLab.ca) for Autism and Development. His work has since been centered around understanding sensory and cognitive strengths and challenges in autism at different periods of development, and integrating this knowledge towards the development of effective school-based cognitive interventions neurodiverse learners. To this end, he founded and currently directs the Summit Centre for Education, Research, and Training (SCERT: http://www.summit-scert.com/), a school-based learning, teaching and research centre that brings together experts in the different fields relevant to the education and management of neurodiverse youth.

Gigi Luk

Dr. Gigi Luk is Associate Professor at the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology at McGill University in Montréal, Canada. She obtained her PhD in Cognitive Psychology from York University, Canada. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Rotman Research Institute at the Baycrest Center. Before joining McGill, she was Associate Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Using neuroimaging methods, behavioral methods, and educational data, she leads a transdisciplinary research program examining the cognitive and neural consequences of multilingualism extending across the lifespan.