Theory of Mind, Executive Functioning and Language in Monolingual and Bilingual Preschool Children
Author: Vanessa Diaz
Publisher:
Published: 2011
Total Pages:
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKABSTRACT: Several cognitive factors have been documented to impact theory of mind (ToM) development, particularly false beliefs in preschool children, such as general language ability, syntactic comprehension, and executive functioning (EF). Most of these studies have examined these relations in monolingual children. However, bilingual children have been documented to perform better on EF tasks, but poorer on language tasks, which raises important issues regarding their ToM development. Two questions were of interest in the current study: Are there differences in bilingual-monolingual preschoolers on ToM, language, and EF? ; and (2) What is the role of language and EF in predicting ToM performance in these monolingual and bilingual groups? These questions were examined by comparing 32 Spanish-English bilinguals and 33 English monolinguals between the ages of 3 and 5 years of age. Even though monolinguals outperformed bilinguals on language measures, after controlling for language, bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on ToM. There were no differences between the groups on EF measures. Finally, after controlling for age, language ability was correlated to ToM performance in the monolingual group; no such relationship was present in the bilingual group.