Emergent Bilingualism and Working Memory Development in School Aged Children

Epub ahead of print 21/11/2016The present research explores working memory (WM) development in monolingual as well as emergent bilingual children immersed in an L2 at school. Evidence from recent years suggests that bilingualism may boost domain-general executive control, but impair nonexecutive linguistic processing. Both are relevant for verbalWM,but different paradigms currently in use vary in the degree to which they reflect these subprocesses. We found that only younger immersion students outperformed monolinguals on the n-back task, a measure of executive WM updating, but showed a relative deficit in L1 rapid naming and, to a lesser degree, reading span scores. Age effects suggest that, rather than ultimate performance levels, bilingualism alters the developmental course of WM processes. We conclude that emergent bilingualism may modulate WM development in school-aged children at the subcomponent level, but detecting this modulation is contingent on task selection.This research was partially supported by doctoral research grant AP2010-3434 from the Spanish Ministry of Education to Laura Birke Hansen, grant CSD2008-00048 to all authors, grant PSI2012-32287 from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness to Pedro Macizo, grant PSI2012-33625 from the Spanish Ministry of Education, and grants CTS 2369 from the Andalusian Government, and APCIN. NSF-PIRE to M. Teresa Baj