Is Two Better Than One?: Analogical Reasoning in Bilingual and Monolingual Children

Research suggests that bilinguals have better Executive Functions (EFs) than monolinguals; in\ud particular, bilinguals are better at inhibiting responses to irrelevant stimuli (Bialystok & Martin,\ud 2004). This study asks whether this bilingual advantage is generalizable to another fundamental\ud cognitive process: analogical reasoning. Bilingual and monolingual children's analogical\ud reasoning was tested using the Relational Match-to-sample (RMTS) task, a classic analogy task\ud that asks children to match relations between the sample and the target choices. Bilingual and\ud monolingual children of 3- and 4-years-old performed comparably when they had to match the\ud choices based on the relations. Critically, however, when the relational matches were pitted\ud against the object matches, bilingual children outperformed their monolingual peers in selecting\ud the relational matches (e.g., analogy). The same bilingual children, on the other hand, did not\ud perform better than the monolinguals in the Simon task, a standard inhibitory control task.\ud Overall, these results suggest that there may be factors other than inhibitory control that\ud contribute to the bilingual advantage in analogical reasoning. This is one of the first studies that\ud show bilingual-monolingual cognitive differences in analogical reasoning