Investigating the Working Memory and Language Acquisition Strategies Among Monolingual and Bilingual Children in a Classroom’s Setting (original) (raw)
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This research investigates whether early childhood bilingualism affects working memory performance in 6- to 8-year-olds, followed over a longitudinal period of three years. The study tests the hypothesis that bilinguals might exhibit more efficient working memory abilities than monolinguals, potentially via the opportunity a bilingual environment provides to train cognitive control by combating interference and intrusions from the non-target language. Forty-four bilingual and monolingual children, matched on age, sex, and socioeconomic status, completed assessments of working memory (simple span and complex span tasks), fluid intelligence, and language (vocabulary and syntax). The data showed that the monolinguals performed significantly better on the language measures across the years whereas no language group effect emerged on the working memory and fluid intelligence tasks after verbal abilities were considered. The study suggests that the need to manage several language systems in the bilingual mind affects children’s language skills whilst having little impact on the development of working memory abilities.
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European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 2013
The present research investigates the relative contributions of verbal short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) to vocabulary development in the early years among Greek-speaking children. Participants were 5.5-, 7.5-, 8.5-and 9.5-yearold (N=216) native speakers of Greek, a language differing from English in which most investigations have been conducted. Children were assessed with a receptive vocabulary task, four verbal STM measures (word, digit, and nonword list recall, as well as word list matching), and three verbal WM tasks (listening, counting, and backward digit recall). Results offer support to the view that both STM and WM influence vocabulary development in early stages. Vocabulary was associated with verbal STM at 7.5 and 8.5 years, but only with verbal WM at 5.5 years. Associations declined with age (by 9.5 years), earlier than in English-speaking children. Findings are discussed in relation to Greek language characteristics, demonstrating the importance of cross-cultural investigations.
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Working memory (WM) is defined as a limited capacity memory for keeping and processing information in mind for a short time. There have been debates on whether knowing more than one language leads to advantages in WM capacity. In the current study, we tested whether there are WM capacity or structure differences in monolingual, bilingual and multilingual adults. WM models often distinguish between verbal and visual stores. We predicted: 1) there would be greater working memory capacity for each additional language known and 2) bilinguals and multilinguals would show greater integration between verbal and visuospatial memory than monolinguals. 60 monolingual, 101 bilingual, and 28 multilingual adults were asked to complete verbal (Digit Span) and visuospatial WM (Corsi Block) tasks, both forward and backward. The results showed little difference in WM capacity between the three groups. Principal component analysis revealed two WM components for bilingual and multilingual groups: 1) visual WM (forward and backward) and 2) verbal WM (forward and backward). In contrast, only one WM component was observed among the monolinguals. These results suggest greater specialization in WM modality among speakers of multiple languages. Future research will test whether these differences are causally linked to the acquisition of multiple languages.
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