An Assessment Of The Effects Of Ses On The Development Of Executive Attention In Singapore: 4 To 6-Year-Old English-Malay Bilinguals

Socioeconomic status (SES) is known to correlate with various aspects of cognitive development in childhood (Gathercole, Thomas, Jones, 2010; Noble, McCandliss, & Farah, 2007). In particular, previously attested advances in executive attention (EA) attributed to bilingualism in childhood (Bialystok, 2011; Yang, Yang, & Lust, 2011) have been argued to be confounded by variations in SES in the populations studied. Hence, results must now be tested for generalizations across cultures and varying levels of SES. Our study tests whether SES variation arrests superior EA in childhood, in a predominantly bilingual Singaporean Malay population. Thirty-four English-Malay bilingual children (19 females, 15 males) from Singapore were tested in this study. This sample had a mean age of 66.91 months (SD = 9.14), with ages ranging from 43 to 101 months. Although this Malay sample revealed several SES measures below the Singapore mean, their EA rates as tested by the child-Attention Network Test (Rueda et al., 2004) remained high when compared to other populations of monolingual and bilingual children (Yang et al., 2011; Kang, 2009). In addition, EA was strongly correlated with English vocabulary, but not significantly correlated with any of the three SES measures (father‟s and mother‟s education, and income). However, income was significantly correlated with English vocabulary scores. Our findings suggest that SES deficits alone are insufficient to diminish high EA rat es, as previous literature hypothesized (Mezzacappa, 2004; Morton & Harper, 2007). We conclude that development of bilingualism and SES are partially independent variables (Bialystok, 2011; Gathercole et al., 2010); although SES components can and do modify language development. 8