Do bilingual children perform more efficiently in different experimental tasks than their monolingual peers?

Klara Marton

Studies on executive functions in bilingual children show mixed findings. Some authors report no group difference between bilingual and monolingual children in executive functions, such as attention control (e.g., Antón et al., 2014), whereas others show superior performance in bilingual children compared to their monolingual peers on the same tasks (e.g., Yang, Yang, & Lust, 2011). What are the sources of these contradictory findings? Several contributing factors have been identified in the bilingual literature. The role of the following factors will be discussed in this presentation: 1. individual language proficiency; 2. language context (societal level); 3. cultural background; 4. overall speed of processing. Based on our own research findings, we will show how the above factors interact with implicit learning, performance monitoring, and interference control in school-age children.