The Relationship Between Bilingual Learning And Preschool Children’s Executive Function

The relationship between bilingualism and cognitive development has always been an important topic.Executive function mainly consists of cognitive flexibility,inhibitory control and working memory.Some researchers put forward the theory of “bilingual cognitive advantage”,which holds the view that individuals with bilingual experience will perform better than monolinguals in terms of cognitive function.Although some studies have shown that bilingual experience plays an important role in promoting the development of individual executive function,some studies have not found this dominant effect,and there is no consistent and stable conclusion on the relationship between bilingual experience and individual executive function.This research has focused on the relationship between Chinese preschoolers’ bilingual learning experience and the development of their executive function,which is of great practical significance for all walks of life to understand the relationship between preschool children’s English learning and cognitive development.Bilingual children with more bilingual learning experience and monolingual children with less bilingual learning experience(including those who had not participated in English learning activities)were selected as research subjects.Preschool children’s cognitive flexibility,inhibitory control and working memory were measured by five behavioral tasks.After controlling for variables such as children’s gender,month age,intelligence score and family socioeconomic status,this study compared the differences between bilingual children with more bilingual learning experience and monolingual children with less bilingual learning experience on their task performance,the results showed that:(1)As for cognitive flexibility,children with more bilingual learning experience performed better than that of children with less bilingual learning experience;(2)As for inhibition control,although there was no significant difference between the two groups in terms of response inhibition ability,children with more bilingual learning experience performed better on interference inhibition ability;(3)As for working memory,children with more bilingual learning experience had better performance in both verbal working memory and visual-spatial working memory.Based on the above results,this study found that preschool children with more bilingual learning experience had certain advantages on executive function,which provided evidence to support the presence of “bilingual cognitive advantage”.