May 20, 2019 — Bilingual children are on equal footing with monolingual children when it comes to regulating their behavior, planning and problem-solving, according to a new FIU study.
For more than 20 years, research has suggested children who are bilingual have an advantage when it comes to executive functions, which are the cognitive processes that have to do with managing behaviors and attention. But researchers at the FIU Center for Children and Families say that is not the case for American 9- and 10-year-olds.
“In one of the largest studies to date addressing this question, we failed to find consistent evidence for a bilingual advantage for executive function,” said FIU psychologist and lead author Anthony Dick.
Executive function is responsible for self-monitoring, paying attention, organizing and planning, initiating and completing tasks, and regulating behavior. While parents shouldn’t look to bilingualism as a way to create an advantage for executive function, knowing a second language does offer other benefits including better family relationships, improved cross-cultural communication and in some cases enhanced economic opportunities.
“Although our study indicated slightly lower English vocabulary for bilingual children, I think the benefits to learning a second language far outweigh any of the costs,” Dick said. “Parents should take advantage of opportunities for their children to learn a second language and should continue practices that promote language development more generally, such as reading nightly with their children.”
Using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD) — the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the United States — researchers evaluated a demographically representative sample of 4,524 children ages 9 and 10 across the United States. While they were able to replicate some findings related to language development, when they investigated whether there were additional advantages across executive function tasks, they failed to find any evidence favoring bilingual children. They suggested prior findings showing a bilingual advantage might have been due to chance because smaller numbers of children were investigated in those studies.
Results from the current study point to opportunities for further research into ways to mitigate the deficiencies. Dick explains that future research may identify specific circumstances where a bilingual advantage in executive function may be present in some children and determine if the current results apply to a broader range of ages.
The study was published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
About the FIU Center for Children and Families:
The Center for Children and Families is a Preeminent Program at Florida International University comprised of a nationally recognized team of researchers and service providers committed to improving the lives of children and families struggling with mental health problems. The CCF is a one-stop care facility that provides effective, low-cost treatments to more than 3,000 families each year through clinical services and research programs. With a team of more than 30 of the nation’s best researchers and experts, the assistance of federal funding and university partnerships, the CCF continues to make discoveries about the cause, process, effects and treatment of child and adolescent mental health disorders. Since its establishment in 2010, the CCF has secured more than $133m in external funding for research from sources like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Institution of Education Sciences (IES), the National Science Foundation (NSF), The Children’s Trust and the State of Florida, among others. The CCF also provides training and education to hundreds of students, and continuing education opportunities in evidence-based approaches to thousands of psychologists, mental health professionals and educators nationwide.
About FIU:
Florida International University is Miami’s public research university and in less than five decades has become a top 100 public university, according to U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges. FIU is focused on student success and research excellence, with nearly $200 million in annual research expenditures. The Next Horizon campaign is furthering FIU’s commitment to providing students Worlds Ahead opportunities. Today FIU has two campuses and multiple centers, including sites in Qingdao and Tianjin, China, and supports artistic and cultural engagement through its three museums: Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU. FIU is a member of Conference USA, with more than 400 student-athletes participating in 18 sports. The university has awarded more than 330,000 degrees to many leaders in South Florida and beyond. For more information about FIU, visit www.fiu.edu
