Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

7-2011

Abstract

This study investigated whether early especially efficient utilization of executive functioning in young bilinguals would transcend potential cultural benefits. To dissociate potential cultural effects from bilingualism, four-year-old U.S. Korean-English bilingual children were compared to three monolingual groups – English and Korean monolinguals in the U.S.A. and another Korean monolingual group, in Korea. Overall, bilinguals were most accurate and fastest among all groups. The bilingual advantage was stronger than that of culture in the speed of attention processing, inverse processing efficiency independent of possible speed-accuracy trade-offs, and the network of executive control for conflict resolution. A culture advantage favoring Korean monolinguals from Korea was found in accuracy but at the cost of longer response times.

Keywords

bilingual cognitive advantage, culture, executive attention, Attention Network Test

Discipline

Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education | Multicultural Psychology

Research Areas

Psychology

Publication

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition

Volume

14

Issue

3

First Page

412

Last Page

422

ISSN

1366-7289

Identifier

10.1017/S1366728910000611

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728910000611

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