Investigating the bilingual advantage: the impact of L2 exposure on the social and cognitive skills of monolingually-raised children in bilingual education

ABSTRACT

Most research reporting that bilingual children exhibit enhanced cognitive skills and social awareness relative to their monolingual peers focusses on children raised and educated bilingually, making it difficult to pinpoint the degree of second language exposure necessary for such advantages to materialise. The current study measures the social and cognitive skills of Spanish children educated bilingually yet raised monolingually to explore (a) whether bilingual education alone confers advantages, and (b) whether greater second language exposure is key to producing them. It compares three groups of monolingually-raised children in their first year of primary education (i.e. 6–7 years old): one group educated in mainstream ‘monolingual’ education, one group enrolled in English-Spanish bilingual education with a ratio of 40–60 English-Spanish exposure, and one group enrolled in English-Spanish education with a ratio of 30–70 English-Spanish exposure. After one year of primary education, children attending bilingual education scored significantly higher than monolingual children on a sub-set of cognitive (selective attention; response inhibition) and social (communication; co-operation) skills, with the higher exposure bilingual school outperforming the lower exposure bilingual school on some of these measures.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• cognitive skills
• social skills
• L2 exposure
• Spanish
• English

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Our original intention was to include bilingual schools whose English exposure differed more sharply. However, all bilingual schools in Spain offer a similar programme at this stage of primary education, with the great majority offering a 30%-70% split for English and Spanish, respectively. Consequently, we could not find bilingual schools that differed more in their L2 exposure (we excluded international schools, as their curriculum is entirely in English and many of their pupils do not come from monolingual Spanish families).

2 Family educational level was calculated on a scale from 0 to 4 (0 = no qualification; 1= Secondary Education certificate; 2 = Further Education qualification; 3 = Certificate/Diploma of Higher Education; 4 = Bachelor's degree with honours) based on the parents’/primary care-giver’s highest educational qualification.

3 Note that since the Balloons 5, SRT, and Hide&Seek Auditory tasks are measured in response times, lower scores indicate a better performance than higher scores. This is also true for the SART task (i.e. fewer triangle trials where participants pressed the space bar).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gloria Chamorro

Dr. Gloria Chamorro is a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the University of Kent, UK. She received her PhD in Developmental Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, which focused on first language attrition and its effects in the processing and interpretation of structures at the syntax-pragmatics interface in Spanish near-native speakers of English. Apart from first language attrition, Gloria also researches on first and second language acquisition and processing of syntactic structures, and bilingualism across the lifespan, including bilingual education and its impact on children’s social and cognitive development. Gloria is the project leader and coordinator of The English Hub for Refugees, which she established in 2016 at the University of Kent. This project investigates the language learning difficulties and needs of refugees in the UK and conducts different activities to help refugees and asylum seekers gain the English language skills they need to integrate into the community and access mainstream education and jobs.

Vikki Janke

Dr. Vikki Janke is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Kent, UK. She received her PhD in Theoretical Linguistics from University College London, where she developed a PRO-free syntactic representation of control, focusing on English and Icelandic. Since then she has held research and teaching posts at the Institute of Education, the Department of Human Communication Science at UCL and at Middlesex University. Vikki has published on syntax, first language acquisition in typical development, syntactic and pragmatic development in individuals on the autism spectrum and second language acquisition in spoken and signed languages. Her research on language in autism has been sponsored by the British Academy and she is currently collaborating on a three-year Leverhulme research grant entitled ‘Breaking into Sign Language: the role of input and individual differences’. Vikki is also the Reviews Editor for First Language.