Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-04T21:30:17.717Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Literacy, metalinguistic, and executive functions processing in bilingual children speakers of similar typology languages in a border area

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2021

Talita dos Santos Gonçalves Open the ORCID record for Talita dos Santos Gonçalves [Opens in a new window] ,
Vanisa Fante Viapiana ,
Rochele Paz Fonseca  and
Lilian Cristine Hübner
Talita dos Santos Gonçalves
Affiliation:
Federal Institute of Alagoas – IFAL, Batalha, Alagoas, Brazil
Vanisa Fante Viapiana
Affiliation:
Universidade de Passo Fundo – UPF, Passo Fundo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil Psychology Graduate Program (Human Cognition), Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul – PUCRS, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Rochele Paz Fonseca
Affiliation:
Psychology Graduate Program (Human Cognition), Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul – PUCRS, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) – Brasília, Brazil
Lilian Cristine Hübner*
Affiliation:
National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) – Brasília, Brazil Linguistics Graduate Program, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul – PUCRS, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
*
Address for correspondence: Lilian Cristine Hubner, E-mail: [email protected], [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze whether there are differences between bilingual (Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish) and monolingual (Brazilian Portuguese) school children regarding reading and writing learning achievement, in executive functions (EF) components and metalinguistic abilities. Twenty-three bilingual and 23 monolingual children, aged 6 to 8 years, were assessed in terms of their writing, reading, and metalinguistic abilities, and with verbal and non-verbal tasks testing EF. A bilingual advantage was observed in reading and writing abilities and in 16 of the 44 EF measures, including subcomponents of working memory, inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and executive attention, mainly in non-verbal paradigms, while monolingual children outperformed bilingual ones in three scores: counting errors (Five Digits Test), omission of bells (Bells test) and sequential trial B (Trail Making Test). There were moderate and weak effect sizes in metalinguistic subcomponents showing bilingual advantage. Literacy improvement seems to have the potential to increase linguistic and cognitive abilities.

Keywords

bilingualismchildrenexecutive functionsmetalanguageliteracy
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , August 2021 , pp. 758 - 766
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

American Psychological Association (APA) (2010) Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6.ª ed.). Washington, DC: APA.Google Scholar
Antón, E, Carreiras, M and Duñabeitia, JA (2019) The impact of bilingualism on executive functions and working memory in young adults. PLoS ONE 14, e0206770. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206770CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Antón, E, Duñabeitia, JA, Estévez, A, Hernández, JA, Castillo, A, Fuentes, LJ and Carreiras, M (2014) Is there a bilingual advantage in the ANT task: Evidence from children. Frontiers in psychology 5, 398. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00398.Google Scholar
Associação Brasileira de Empresas de Pesquisa. (2016) Brazilian Criteria 2015 and social class distribution update for 2016. Acesso em: 03/05/2017. Disponível em: http://www.abep.org/criterio-brasilGoogle Scholar
Barac, R and Bialystok, E (2012) Bilingual effects on cognitive and linguistic development: role of language, cultural background, and education. Child development 83, 413–422. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01707.xCrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barrera, SD and Maluf, MR (2003) Consciência metalingüística e alfabetização: um estudo com crianças da primeira série do ensino fundamental. Psicologia: Reflexão e Crítica 16, 491–502. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0102-79722003000300008Google Scholar
Bialystok, E (2015) Bilingualism and the Development of Executive Function: The Role of Attention. Child development perspectives 9, 117–121. doi:10.1111/cdep.12116CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E (2010) Global-local and trail-making tasks by monolingual and bilingual children: beyond inhibition. Developmental psychology 46, 93–105.doi:10.1037/a0015466CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E (2007) Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy, and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511605963Google Scholar
Bialystok, E, Craik, FIM, Green, DW and Gollan, TH (2009) Bilingual Minds. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 10, 89–129. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100610387084CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E and Viswanathan, M (2009) Components of executive control with advantages for bilingual children in two cultures. Cognition 112, 494–500. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2009.06.014CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E, McBride-Chang, C and Luk, G (2005) Bilingualism, Language Proficiency, and Learning to Read in Two Writing Systems. Journal of Educational Psychology 97, 580–590.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blom, E, Kuntay, AC, Messer, M, Verhagen, J and Leseman, P. (Org.). (2014) The benefits of being bilingual: Working memory in bilingual Turkish-Dutch children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 128, 105–119.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carlson, SM and Meltzoff, AN (2008) Bilingual experience and executive functioning in young children. Developmental Science 11, 282–298. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00675.xCrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carvalho, AM (2002) Português para falantes de espanhol: Perspectivas de um campo de pesquisa. Hispania 85, p. 597–608.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chung-Fat-Yim, A, Himel, C and Bialystok, E (2019) The impact of bilingualism on executive function in adolescents. International Journal of Bilingualism 23, 1278–1290. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006918781059CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cohen, C (2013) Effect of degree of bilingualism on metalinguistic awareness in English-French bilingual children. The International Workshop for Bilingualism and Cognitive Control, May 2013, Krakow, Poland. hal-01079079Google Scholar
Cohen, J (1988) Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.Google Scholar
Davidson, D, Raschke, VR and Pervez, J (2010) Syntactic awareness in young monolingual and bilingual (Urdu–English) children. Cognitive Development 25, 166–182. doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2009.07.003CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, D and Raschke, VR (2008) Metalinguistic awareness in monolingual and bilingual children and its relationship to receptive vocabulary scores and performance on a reading readiness test. Poster presented at the Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA.Google Scholar
Diamond, A (2013) Executive functions. Annual review of psychology 64, 135–168. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143750CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Duñabeitia, JA, Hernández-Cabrera, J, Antón, E, Macizo, P, Estévez, A, Fuentes, L and Carreiras, M (2013) The Inhibitory Advantage in Bilingual Children Revisited: Myth or Reality? Experimental psychology. 61, 1–18. 10.1027/1618-3169/a000243.Google Scholar
Engel de Abreu, PM (2011) Working memory in multilingual children: Is there a bilingual effect?. Memory 19, 529–537.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eviatar, Z, Taha, H, Cohen, V and Schwartz, M (2018) Word learning by young sequential bilinguals: Fast mapping in Arabic and Hebrew. Applied Psycholinguistics 39, 649–674. doi:10.1017/S0142716417000613CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fonseca, RP, Jacobsen, GM and Pureza, JR (2015) O que um bom teste neuropsicológico deve ter? Em Salles, JF, Haase, VG and Malloy-Diniz, LF Neuropsicologia do desenvolvimento: Infância e adolescência. Porto Alegre: Artmed.Google Scholar
Francis, N (2002) Literacy, second language learning, and the development of metalinguistic awareness: A study of bilingual children's perceptions of focus on form. Linguistics and Education 13, 373–404. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0898-5898(01)00077-8CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, VC, Thomas, EM, Kennedy, I, Prys, C, Young, N, Viñas Guasch, N and Jones, L (2014) Does language dominance affect cognitive performance in bilinguals? Lifespan evidence from preschoolers through older adults on card sorting, Simon, and metalinguistic tasks. Frontiers in psychology 5, 11. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00011CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goldin-Meadow, S, Levine, SC, Hedges, LV, Huttenlocher, J, Raudenbush, SW and Small, SL (2014) New evidence about language and cognitive development based on a longitudinal study: hypotheses for intervention. The American psychologist 69, 588–599. doi:10.1037/a0036886CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Green, DW and Abutalebi, J (2013) Language control in bilinguals: The adaptive control hypothesis. Journal of cognitive psychology 25, 515–530. doi:10.1080/20445911.2013.796377CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grosjean, F (2010) Bilingual: Life and Reality. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halsey, LG (2019) The reign of the p-value is over: what alternative analyses could we employ to fill the power vacuum? Biology Letters. http://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0174CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartanto, A, Toh, WX and Yang, H (2019) Bilingualism Narrows Socioeconomic Disparities in Executive Functions and Self-Regulatory Behaviors During Early Childhood: Evidence From the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Child Development 90, 1215–1235. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13032CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hilchey, MD and Klein, RM (2011) Are there bilingual advantages on nonlinguistic interference tasks? Implications for the plasticity of executive control processes, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 18, 625–658. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-011-0116-7CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hubner, LC (2016) Brasil, Brazil, Brésil: um país mono, bi ou multilingue?. CONECTA: revista da Rede Nacional da Ciência para a Educação, São Paulo, p. 1–3, 16 jun.Google Scholar
Jaekel, N, Jaekel, J, Willard, J and Leyendecker, B (2019) No evidence for effects of Turkish immigrant children‘s bilingualism on executive functions. PLoS ONE 14, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209981CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kang, J (2012) Do bilingual children possess better phonological awareness?: Investigation of Korean monolingual and Korean-English bilingual children. Reading and Writing 25, 411–431.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroll, JF and Bialystok, E (2013) Understanding the Consequences of Bilingualism for Language Processing and Cognition. Journal of cognitive psychology 25, 10.1080/20445911.2013.799170. doi:10.1080/20445911.2013.799170CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kroll, JF, Bobb, SC and Hoshino, N (2014) Two languages in mind: Bilingualism as a tool to investigate language, cognition, and the brain. Current directions in psychological science 23, 159–163. doi:10.1177/0963721414528511CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laurent, A and Martinot, C (2010) Bilingualism and phonological awareness: the case of bilingual (French – Occitan) children. Reading Writing. 23, 435–452.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luo, L, Luk, G and Bialystok, E. (Org.). (2010) Effect of language proficiency and executive control on verbal fluency performance in bilinguals. Cognition 114, 29–41.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marian, V, Blumenfeld, HK and Kaushanskaya, M (2007) The Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q): Assessing language profiles in bilinguals and multilinguals. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 50, 940–967. DOI: 10.1044/1092-4388(2007/067CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Martin-Rhee, M and Bialystok, E (2008) The development of two types of inhibitory control in monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 11, 81–93. doi:10.1017/S1366728907003227CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mendonça, SM (2009) Os efeitos metalinguísticos e cognitivos de uma experiência de exposição à L2 em contexto formal de ensino de crianças. 61 f. Trabalho de conclusão de curso de Graduação em Letras – Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RSGoogle Scholar
Morais, AB (2016) Construção e evidências de fidedignidade e validade de uma escala de leitura e escrita (ELE) para o rastreio de crianças com dificuldades escolares. Dissertation, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul.Google Scholar
Morales, J, Calvo, A and Bialystok, E. (Org.). (2013) Working memory development in monolingual and bilingual children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 114, 187–202.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Morello, R and Seiffert, AP (2019) Multilinguismo e ensino nas fronteiras. Línguas e Instrumentos Linguísticos 43, Jan-Jun, 217–236.Google Scholar
Paap, KR, Johnson, HA and Sawi, O. (Org.). (2015) Bilingual advantages in executive functioning either do not exist or are restricted to very specific and undetermined circumstances. Cortex 69, 265–278.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Paap, KR and Sawi, O (2014) Bilingual advantages in executive functioning: problems in convergent validity, discriminant validity, and the identification of the theoretical constructs. Frontiers in psychology 5, 962. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00962CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Piantá, P (2011) O desenvolvimento da Consciência Metalinguística analisado em diferentes contextos bilíngues no Brasil. 102 f. Dissertação de Mestrado em Letras - Programa de Pós Graduação em Letras UFRGS, Porto AlegreGoogle Scholar
Poarch, GJ and Bialystok, E (2015) Bilingualism as a Model for Multitasking. Developmental Review 35, 113–124. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. dr.2014.12.003CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Proctor, C. P, August, D, Snow, C and Barr, CD (2010) The Interdependence Continuum: A Perspective on the Nature of Spanish–English Bilingual Reading Comprehension. Bilingual Research Journal., 33:5–20.Google Scholar
Safinia, L (2015) Metalinguistic Awareness In Bilingual Children. Retrieved from the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy, http://hdl.handle.net/11299/171786.Google Scholar
Salles, JF, Fonseca, RP, Parente, MA, Cruz-Rodrigues, C, Mello, CB, Barbosa, T and Miranda, MC (2016) Instrumento de Avaliação Neuropsicológica Breve Infantil: NEUPSILIN-Inf – Manual. São Paulo: Editora Vetor.Google Scholar
Sánchez-Azanza, V.A., López-Penadés, R, Buil-Legaz, L, Aguilar-Mediavilla, E and Adrover-Roig, D (2017) Is Bilingualism Losing its advantage? A bibliometric approach. PLoS ONE 12: e0176151. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0176151CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schuele, CM and Justice, LM (2006) The importance of effect sizes in the interpretation of research. The ASHA Leader 11, 14–27. https://doi.org/10.1044/leader. FTR4.11102006.14CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sedó, M, de Paula, J and Malloy-Diniz, L (2015) O Teste dos Cinco Dígitos, São Paulo: Hogrefe.Google Scholar
Serratrice, L, Sorace, A, Filiaci, F and Baldo, M. (Org.). (2009) Bilingual children's sensitivity to specificity and genericity: evidence from metalinguistic awareness. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 12, 239–257.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siqueira, LS, Gonçalves, HA, Hübner, LC and Fonseca, RP (2016) Development of the Brazilian version of the Child Hayling Test. Trends in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy. 38, 164–174. doi:10.1590/2237-6089-2016-0019CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stein, LM, Giacomoni, CH and Fonseca, RP (2019) Teste de Desempenho Escolar - TDE II. 1. ed. São Paulo: Vetor, 1. 180 p.Google Scholar
Trevisan, BT and Seabra, AG (2012) Teste de Trilhas para Pré-escolares. In: Seabra, AG and Dias, NM (eds), Avaliação neuropsicológica cognitiva: atenção e Funções Executivas. 1. São Paulo: Memnon, 92–100.Google Scholar
Valian, V (2015) Bilingualism and cognition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 18, 3–24. 10.1017/S1366728914000522.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valian, V (2016) Putting together bilingualism and executive function. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 6, 565–574. https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.15044.valCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van der Vel de Kremin, L, Arredondo, MM, Hsu, L, Satterfield, T and Kovelman, I (2019)The effects of Spanish heritage language literacy on English reading for Spanish–English bilingual children in the US. International Journal of bilingual education and bilingualism 22, 192–206. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2016.1239692CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yates, DB, Trentini, CM, Tosi, SD, Corrêa, SK, Poggere, LC and Valli, F (2006) Apresentação da Escala de Inteligência Wechsler abreviada: (WASI). Avaliação Psicológica 5, 227–233. Recuperado em 31 de mar de 2019, de http://pepsic.bvsalud.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1677-04712006000200012&lng=pt&tlng=pt.Google Scholar