The development of cognitive inhibition in bilingual children

Previous research suggests that children who speak two or more languages are more successful at tasks requiring selective attention and inhibition of a salient alternative response than are monolingual children. The nature and breadth of this advantage is as of yet undefined. Four versions of the Dimensional Change Card Sort task developed by Zelazo and his colleagues were administered to 36 monolingual children and 31 bilingual children in an effort to elucidate this question. These tasks were designed to maintain the need for inhibitory control in the postswitch phase of the games, while varying the amount of analysis required to process the rules. Results showed that where the task had little analysis demands, but was exacting of control demands, no differences between the language groups were found. However, when the amount of analysis required increased slightly, the monolingual children were no longer executing the postswitch rules effectively. Where the task became semantically rich, and hence required more analysis, other cognitive functions took over and the bilingual advantage washed out Results are discussed in terms of the Control/Analysis framework.