The Influence Of Second Language Learning Experience On Children's Executive Control Function

Many researchers pay more attention on the effect of bilingualism to children.Participants in most of these studies are exposed to two languages since birth.However,little researches contract the executive functions of second-language learners and monolinguals.Our study is aimed to investigate whether the bilingualism has the same effect on their executive control functions and how the duration of second language learning and amount of daily exposure influence the above functions.We divided children into two groups according to their duration of English learning.The long contact group(LCG)had twenty-eight participants with the average duration of thirty-six months while the short contact group(SCG)had thirty-six participants with the average duration of five months.Except for Raven' Color Progressive Matrices and Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised,all children performed the Dimensional Change Card Sort(DCCS)tasks(study1)and working memory tasks(study2).In study 1,there were three types for DCCS task,including the color game,the color-shape game and the location-function game.In each game,participants sorted the card according to a given rules(such as “color”),then they had to resort the cards in the other rule(such as “shape”).There were two phases of sorting,the pre-switch phase and the post-switch phase.In study 2,working memory tasks has two types,too.The verbal working memory task included the forward digital recall and the backward digital recall.We adopted the Frog Matrices Task to measure the visual-spatial working memory.It had two conditions,one was simultaneous presentation and the other was sequential presentation.The results showed,(1)For DCCS task,the main effects of group,game type and the phase were significant.There were two significant two-way interaction of group by phase and game type by phase.The interaction effect of game type by group was marginally significant.The participants in LCG had better performance than those in SCG no matter what type the game was.Moreover,the duration of English learning could positively predict the scores of post-switch phase of each game.Meanwhile,the daily exposure also could positively predict the scores of post-switch phase in color-shape game and the scores of pre-switch phase in location-function game.(2)For working memory task,either analysis of accuracy(visual-spatial working memory)/score(verbal working memory)or memory span,the results all indicated main effect of condition,no other main effect and interact were found.However,the duration of English learning could positively predict the performance of backward digital recall.In addition,the daily exposure could positively predict the score of backward digital recall,too.The conclusions of this study as follows:(1)the studies shows an advantage for second-language learning children that is especially evident when the task was more integrative.(2)The duration of second-language learning and the daily exposure all impact the children's executive control function.