08:30 - 10:00
Wed-B22-Talk VI-
Wed-Talk VI-
Room: B22
Chair/s:
Miriam Gade
In the present symposium, we plan to bring together different perspectives of how language influences goal-directed performance in mostly language unrelated tasks. Language influences are present either because of instructions, automatic reliance on or because of individual preferences. The contributors to this symposium will present work investigating language(s) as an instructional tool, language as help for or hindrance of cognitive flexibility, language(s) as performance-regulating tool in single subject and co-agents’ settings and address measurement of inner speech and its impact on basic cognitive performance. Given the recently revoked interest in the connection
between language, cognition and performance, this symposium aims at bringing together different research endeavours and stipulate discussions and cooperations among involved researchers.
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Executive functions in mono- and bilingual children: Factor structure and relations with fluid intelligence
Wed-B22-Talk VI-04
Presented by: Verena Johann
Verena Johann 1, 2, Susanne Enke 3, 4, Catherine Gunzenhauser 4, 5, Tanja Könen 1, 2, 6, Henrik Saalbach 3, 4, Julia Karbach 1, 2
1 Department of Psychology, RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau, 2 Center for Research on Individual Development and Adaptive Education of Children at Risk (IDeA), Frankfurt, Germany, 3 Department of Educational Psychology, Leipzig University, 4 Leipzig Research Center for Early Child Development, Leipzig University, 5 Department of Educational Sciences, University of Freiburg, 6 Department of Psychology, RWTH Aachen University
The effects of bilingualism on executive functions (EF) and intelligence are still controversially discussed. Most studies focused on performance differences without considering the underlying structure of cognitive abilities. Thus, we examined whether the structure of EF and the relations of EF with intelligence differ between mono- and bilingual children. A total of 240 elementary school children (mean age = 8;6 years, 133 monolinguals, 95 bilinguals) performed two tasks measuring working memory, inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and fluid intelligence, respectively. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) showed that one common EF-factor provided the best fit to the data in both language groups, indicating that bilingualism is not associated with differences in the EF structure at this age. Moreover, there were no latent performance differences, neither in EF nor intelligence between mono- and bilingual children. However, we found a stronger relation between a common EF-factor and fluid intelligence in bilingual as compared to monolingual children, implying a closer coupling of latent processing (EF) and inference (intelligence) abilities in bilingual children. This contributes to explain the previous heterogeneous findings on the task level, because more closely coupled cognitive functioning can be slightly beneficial for some tasks, and irrelevant or even slightly obstructive for others.
Keywords: Bilingualism, executive functions, intelligence, childhood, SEM
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