The Effect Of Preschool Bilingualism On Executive Function

In recent years,more and more bilingual kindergartens pop up and all kinds of bilingual educational concepts spring up like mushrooms after rain because of exuberant demand of preschool bilingual education.These phenomena make parents increasingly worry about that whether their young children learn and how to learn English.On the other hand,most of the academic research about preschool education which focus on the basic orientation and educational modal always like the method of theoretical speculation or educational experiment.However,these studies which cost many social resources not only fail to answer parents' big question about the influence of bilingualism on their child's development and also fail to fight back some wrong opinions wearing the coat of myth of brain science.Executive function involves a series of high-level cognitive abilities and mechanisms related to tasks,which plays an important role in the lifelong development of individuals and develops rapidly in the early childhood development stage.For respond to “whether preschool children should learn English or not”,this study combined behavioral testing tasks and fNIRS brain imaging experiments and focused on whether the Mandarin-Chinese dominated unbalanced bilingual children's learning English has a positive impact on cognitive development,that is to say,the effect of bilingualism on executive function.Secondly,this study explored the bilingual cognitive advantage's internal mechanism and its constraints.At last,based on the discovery of the constraints,the effect of two natural English study types on cognitive advantage were discussed,namely,listening story from picture book and watching the English cartoons.After controlled socio-economic status(SES),children's intelligence,age and language development level,38(19 males)bilingual children and 66 male(31 males)monologues were randomly selected and were compared on some executive function behavioral tests.The study found that bilingual children perform significantly better than monolingual children and their tests performance significantly correlate with English proficiency.What's more,bilingual children activated left prefrontal cortex(left inferior gyrus and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex)more than monolingual children.Therefore,this study verified the opinion that unbalanced bilingual children also have the bilingual cognitive advantage and bilingual experience shapes the brain.Secondly,the causal mechanism and restrictive factors of bilingual cognitive advantage were discovered in this study and the overlapped brain areas were also found in executive control task and language control task: left inferior gyrus and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.That is,the mechanism of bilingual selection and control includes the process of executive control,which is the reason of bilingual cognitive advantage.In addition,the study also found that children's English proficiency and frequency of children's comprehensive English learning activities are significantly corelated to the activation of overlapped brain.It's clear that the comprehensive English activities promote children's English proficiency and bilingual brain's activation.Thirdly,this study analyzed the influence of two kinds of multimedia learning forms,such as Picture Book Listening and Animation,on bilingual cognitive advantage.The activation of prefrontal cortex of listening English part is more active than Chinese and is influenced by the difficulty of story.However,the study found that there was no difference in the level of activation of the prefrontal cortex as compared with Chinese animation and English animation.Based on the theories of multimedia cognitive theory and cognitive load theory,the research suggests that Picture Book Listening is helpful to bilingual language development and brain growth,while watching animation irrespective of cognitive load on children may doesn't work.Finally,some education suggestions and research innovations are put forward to the readers.The hypothesis of bilingual advantage is tenable,that bilingual brain has the positive impact of cognitive development.Following the internal mechanism of bilingual switching contributing to cognitive control,some effective preschool bilingual education mode could be explored in area with suitable conditions.For promoting children's English proficiency,educational staff should pay more attention to the restricting factors of the internal brain mechanism and implement more comprehensive activities including receptive and expressive English.On the other hand,under the two principles of developmentally appropriately understanding and interaction between young child and adult,we should choose the highquality multimedia resources and design the scientific multimedia curriculum system,which are the effective paths of preschool bilingual education.And also,we suggest that education department should adhere to the dual-track guideline of combination of academic research and pilot practice and encourage higher institute and kindergarten to make pilot study and practice.Only in this condition,some guidelines and advices about children's English learning and education will be put forward under the appropriate time and location.At last,we discussed the innovation embodied in methods and findings about bilingual advantage.