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Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 108 (2011) 567–579

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Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp

The effects of bilingualism on toddlers’ executive functioning
Diane Poulin-Dubois a,⇑, Agnes Blaye b, Julie Coutya a, Ellen Bialystok c
a

Centre for Research in Human Development, ConcordiaUniversity, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H4B 1R6 UFR de Psychologie, Université de Provence, 13621 Aix en Provence Cedex, France c Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3
b

a r t i c l e

i n f o

a b s t r a c t
Bilingual children have been shown to outperform monolingual children on tasks measuring executive functioning skills. This advantage is usuallyattributed to bilinguals’ extensive practice in exercising selective attention and cognitive flexibility during language use because both languages are active when one of them is being used. We examined whether this advantage is observed in 24-month-olds who have had much less experience in language production. A battery of executive functioning tasks and the cognitive scale of the Bayley test wereadministered to 63 monolingual and bilingual children. Native bilingual children performed significantly better than monolingual children on the Stroop task, with no difference between groups on the other tasks, confirming the specificity of bilingual effects to conflict tasks reported in older children. These results demonstrate that bilingual advantages in executive control emerge at an age notpreviously shown. Ó 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Article history: Available online 30 November 2010 Keywords: Attention Cognition Concepts Information processing Language (bilingual) Problem solving

Introduction There has long been interest in determining whether bilingualism leads to linguistic or cognitive differences in both children and adults. Research over the past two decades hasrevealed a number of differences that emerge from growing up with at least two languages (Bialystok, 2009a; Grosjean, 1989). In the most general terms, bilingualism leads to the development of strategies that are adaptive to the unique problem space with which bilingual infants are faced. During the early stages of language acquisition, for example, recent research on speech perception inbilingual and monolingual infants has shown that bilingual infants learn similar sounding words in a word learning task a few
⇑ Corresponding author. Fax: +1 514 848 2815.
E-mail address: diane.poulindubois@concordia.ca (D. Poulin-Dubois). 0022-0965/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2010.10.009

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D. Poulin-Dubois et al. / Journal of ExperimentalChild Psychology 108 (2011) 567–579

months later than monolinguals (Fennell, Byers-Heinlein, & Werker, 2007). However, bilingual infants of the same age can outperform monolinguals in learning word–object associations when the phonetic conditions favor their input (Mattock, Polka, Rvachew, & Krehm, 2010). Research on vocabulary development in bilingual first language acquisition has shown thatbilingual children produce their first words at around the same time as monolingual children (Genesee, 2003; Patterson & Pearson, 2004; Petitto et al., 2001). However, the evidence for differences in vocabulary development in bilingual and monolingual children is mixed, depending on the ages of the children and whether receptive or productive vocabulary is assessed. A smaller receptive vocabulary ineach language compared with monolinguals has been reported in samples of preschool- and school-aged children (Bialystok, Barac, Blaye, & Poulin-Dubois, in press; Bialystok, Luk, Peets, & Yang, 2010; Mahon & Crutchley, 2006), but other studies have shown that the receptive vocabulary of school-aged children is close to that of monolinguals (Cromdal, 1999; Yan & Nicoladis, 2009). With respect to...