Perspective-Taking Ability in Bilingual Children: Extending Advantages in Executive Control to Spatial Reasoning

How do foreign language learning experiences influence the self-reference effect?

People tend to display a processing bias towards information that is personally relevant, as opposed to information that is irrelevant to themselves. Such a bias can be influenced by long-term cultural experiences and temporary cultural priming tasks. However, the impact of the latter is transient, and it is unclear if an intermediate influence, more lasting than temporary priming tasks but less enduring than a cultural background, such as language learning, could induce a similar and stable processing bias. Given that language can shape people's mindset, this study aimed to investigate whether language learning experiences could affect participants' self-processing bias during a decision-making task. The findings showed that while behavioral results were not significant, ERP data indicated that advanced learners had more negative late N400 and P600 components for moderately self-relevant stimuli compared to highly self-relevant ones, mainly in the left or medial hemispheres. Beginners exhibited similar trends with marginal effects from fronto-central to parietal regions. Additionally, beginners displayed more negative N100 and early N400 responses and lacked a left-lateralized low-beta burst compared to advanced learners. These results suggest that the self-reference effect is present in both L2 beginners and advanced learners but is more pronounced in advanced learners. Notably, advanced learners with extensive English experience are more influenced by Western independent self-construal than beginners, leading them to focus more on highly self-related information and exhibit a stronger self-reference effect.

Multilingualism impacts children's executive function and core autism symptoms

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with marked heterogeneity in executive function (EF) abilities. EF components including inhibition and shifting are related to ASD core symptoms such as perspective taking, social communication, and repetitive behavior. Recent research suggests that multilingualism may have a beneficial impact on EF abilities, especially in children with ASD. However, there remains a lack of comprehensive understanding regarding the relationships between multilingualism, EF, and core symptoms in children with ASD. Here, we examined these associations in 7-12-year-old children with and without ASD (N = 116; 53 ASD, Mean age = 9.94 years). Results suggest that multilingual children have stronger parent-reported inhibition, shifting, and perspective-taking skills than monolingual children. Furthermore, we found a significant interaction between diagnosis and multilingual status on inhibition, such that the effects of multilingualism were stronger for children with ASD than typically developing (TD) children. Finally, we found indirect effects of multilingualism on perspective taking, social communication, and repetitive behaviors mediated by EF skills. These results demonstrate the supportive influences multilingual experience might have on bolstering EF and reducing ASD-related symptoms.

Social Brain Perspectives on the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience of Human Language

Human language and social cognition are two key disciplines that have traditionally been studied as separate domains. Nonetheless, an emerging view suggests an alternative perspective. Drawing on the theoretical underpinnings of the social brain hypothesis (thesis of the evolution of brain size and intelligence), the social complexity hypothesis (thesis of the evolution of communication), and empirical research from comparative animal behavior, human social behavior, language acquisition in children, social cognitive neuroscience, and the cognitive neuroscience of language, it is argued that social cognition and language are two significantly interconnected capacities of the human species. Here, evidence in support of this view reviews (1) recent developmental studies on language learning in infants and young children, pointing to the important crucial benefits associated with social stimulation for youngsters, including the quality and quantity of incoming linguistic information, dyadic infant/child-to-parent non-verbal and verbal interactions, and other important social cues integral for facilitating language learning and social bonding; (2) studies of the adult human brain, suggesting a high degree of specialization for sociolinguistic information processing, memory retrieval, and comprehension, suggesting that the function of these neural areas may connect social cognition with language and social bonding; (3) developmental deficits in language and social cognition, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD), illustrating a unique developmental profile, further linking language, social cognition, and social bonding; and (4) neural biomarkers that may help to identify early developmental disorders of language and social cognition. In effect, the social brain and social complexity hypotheses may jointly help to describe how neurotypical children and adults acquire language, why autistic children and adults exhibit simultaneous deficits in language and social cognition, and why nonhuman primates and other organisms with significant computational capacities cannot learn language. But perhaps most critically, the following article argues that this and related research will allow scientists to generate a holistic profile and deeper understanding of the healthy adult social brain while developing more innovative and effective diagnoses, prognoses, and treatments for maladies and deficits also associated with the social brain.

Expanding the emergentist Account:Reply to open peer commentaries

Emergentism provides a framework for understanding how language learning processes vary across developmental age and linguistic levels, as shaped by core mechanisms and constraints from cognition, entrenchment, input, transfer, social support, motivation, and neurology. As our commentators all agree, this landscape is marked by intense variability arising from the complexity. These mechanisms interact in collaborative and competitive ways during actual moments of language use. To better understand these interactions and their effects, we need much richer longitudinal data regarding both input and output during actual contexts of usage. We believe that modern technology can eventually provide this data (Flege & Bohn, 2021) in ways that will allow us to more fully populate an emergent landscape.

Inconsistency in perspective-taking during comprehension

In order to successfully comprehend referring expressions, a listener must often consider how the speaker's perspective differs from their own. Such consideration of others' perspective is effortful and not always employed. Previous studies disagree about whether executive function predicts perspective-taking use in language comprehension. Furthermore, it is unclear whether or not there are consistent individual differences of perspective-taking ability in comprehension. This study tested participants in three perspective-taking in comprehension tasks and two measures of executive function to determine whether participants show consistency in their perspective-taking ability and whether this ability is predicted by measures of executive function. We found that (1) some but not all perspective-taking in comprehension tasks correlate with one another, and (2) inhibition control and working memory are not linked with any of the three perspective-taking measures. Based on these findings, we conclude that perspective-taking in comprehension may not be a unitary ability.

Visuospatial perspective taking in people with Down syndrome

Visuospatial perspective taking (VPT) refers to the process of mentally representing a viewpoint different from one's own. It is related to mental rotation and theory of mind and helps to support some complex spatial activities such as wayfinding. Despite research advances in spatial cognition, little is known about VPT in people with Down syndrome (DS). Here, we examined VPT in people with DS. A total of 38 individuals with DS (aged 12-25 years old) and nonverbal ability-matched typically developing (TD) children (aged 4-9 years old) participated. They completed two VPT tasks: the classic Piagetian Three Mountains Task and a modified version of the "Dog Task" (Newcombe & Huttenlocher, 1992). For both groups, the Three Mountains Task was more difficult than the Dog Task, implying the impact of task complexity on assessing VPT. However, the overall performance did not differ between the TD and DS groups in either VPT task. Implications of the results were discussed.

The Development of Flexible Problem Solving: An Integrative Approach

Flexible problem solving, the ability to deal with currently goal-irrelevant information that may have been goal-relevant in previous, similar situations, plays a prominent role in cognitive development and has been repeatedly investigated in developmental research. However, this research, spanning from infancy to the school years, lacks a unifying framework, obscuring the developmental timing of flexible problem solving. Therefore, in this review paper, previous findings are gathered, organized, and integrated under a common framework to unveil how and when flexible problem solving develops. It is showed that the development of flexible problem solving coincides with increases in executive functions, that is, inhibition, working memory and task switching. The analysis of previous findings shows that dealing with goal-irrelevant, non-salient information received far more attention than generalizing in the presence of goal-irrelevant, salient information. The developmental timing of the latter can only be inferred from few transfer studies, as well as executive functions, planning and theory of mind research, to highlight gaps in knowledge and sketch out future research directions. Understanding how transfer in the presence of seemingly relevant but truly irrelevant information develops has implications for well-balanced participation in information societies, early and lifespan education, and investigating the evolutionary trajectory of flexible problem solving.

Social-Pragmatic Skills and Length of Bilingualism Predict Inhibitory Control in Children

PURPOSE

There is conflicting evidence regarding effects of bilingualism on inhibition, and the mechanisms that might underlie the effects remain unclear. A prominent account views additional demands on structural language use in bilinguals as being at the root of bilingual effects on inhibition. In this study, we tested the novel hypothesis that social-pragmatic skills (alone or together with structural language skills) are associated with inhibition in bilingual children.

METHOD

Parents of 114 typically developing 8- to 11-year-old Spanish-English bilingual children completed the Children's Communication Checklist-Second Edition to index social pragmatics and the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function to index executive functioning skills. The Inhibit clinical scale score reflected children's inhibition. Children's language ability was indexed by the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Fourth Edition in English and Spanish. Length of bilingualism was operationalized continuously as the length of time children had been exposed to both languages in their lifetime. Moderation analyses tested the effects of structural language, social-pragmatic skills, and length of bilingual experience, and their interactions on inhibition.

RESULTS

While structural language skills were not associated with inhibition, they moderated the relation between social-pragmatic skills and inhibition, such that children with better social-pragmatic skills demonstrated better inhibition, and this effect was stronger for children with better structural language skills. Furthermore, longer length of bilingual experience was associated with better inhibition, and this effect was not moderated by any other predictor.

CONCLUSION

These results confirm a graded relationship between bilingualism and inhibition, and indicate that this association is not qualified by structural language or social-pragmatic skills.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21183916.

What is theory of mind? A psychometric study of theory of mind and intelligence

Theory of mind (ToM) is an essential ability for social competence and communication, and it is necessary for understanding behaviors that differ from our own (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). Recent research suggests that tasks designed to measure ToM do not adequately capture a single ToM ability (Warnell & Redcay, 2019; Quesque & Rossetti, 2020) and, instead, might be related to tasks of general cognitive ability (Coyle, Elpers, Gonzalez, Freeman, & Baggio, 2018). This hinders the interpretation of experimental findings and puts into question the validity of the ToM construct. The current study is the first psychometric assessment of the structure of ToM to date. Comparing ToM to crystallized intelligence (Gc) and fluid intelligence (Gf), the study aims to (a) understand whether ToM should be considered a monolithic ability and (b) explore whether tasks of ToM adequately assess ToM, above and beyond general cognitive ability. For this, confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs), exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and exploratory network analysis (NMA) were conducted. The results of the models largely point to the same conclusion: while ToM tasks are not merely assessing cognitive ability, they are not purely assessing a single ToM construct either. Importantly, these findings align with recent theoretical accounts proposing that ToM should not be considered a monolithic construct (Quesque & Rossetti, 2020; Schaafsma, Pfaff, Spunt, & Adolphs, 2015, Devaine, Hollard, & Daunizeau, 2014), and should instead be explored and measured as multiple domains.

It Takes a Village: Using Network Science to Identify the Effect of Individual Differences in Bilingual Experience for Theory of Mind

An increasing amount of research has examined the effects of bilingualism on performance in theory of mind (ToM) tasks. Bilinguals outperform monolinguals in ToM when comparing groups. However, it is unclear what aspects of the bilingual experience contribute to this effect in a dynamic construct like ToM. To date, bilingualism has been conceptualized as a dichotic skill that is distinct from monolingualism, obscuring nuances in the degree that different bilingual experience affects cognition. The current study used a combination of network science, cognitive, and linguistic behavioral measurements to explore the factors that influence perspective-taking ToM based on participants’ current and previous experience with language, as well as their family networks’ experience with language. The results suggest that some aspects of the bilingual experience predict task performance, but not others, and these predictors align with the two-system theory of ToM. Overall, the findings provide evidence for the extent to which individual differences in bilingualism are related to different cognitive outcomes.

Bilingualism Enhances Reported Perspective Taking in Men, but Not in Women

Bilingual speakers have often been found to be superior in taking the perspective of another person. Also, females are commonly found to have enhanced perspective taking (PT) abilities compared with males, with male PT being generally more easily affected by external factors. The present study investigated whether bilingualism improves PT in males more strongly than in females. In total, 108 bilingual and 108 matched monolingual adults, with equal numbers of males and females, filled in the PT subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity index. While monolinguals showed the typical result of females scoring higher on PT than males, scores of male and female bilinguals did not differ, with both bilingual groups scoring as high as female monolinguals. Thus, bilingualism enhanced self-reported PT only in males, suggesting that male PT can be enhanced through socialization.

Adult bilinguals outperform monolinguals in theory of mind

Theory of mind (ToM) is an essential ability for social competence and communication, and it is necessary for understanding behaviours that differ from our own. Research on bilingual children has reported that 3- and 4-year-old bilinguals outperform monolinguals in ToM tasks. Research suggests that adult bilinguals also might outperform monolinguals; nevertheless, this effect has yet to be established. Here, we tested bilingual and monolingual adults on the director task. Results showed that bilingual adults outperformed monolinguals in response to perspective-dependent trials of the director task, but not in response to control trials. This suggests that bilingualism is associated with individuals' ability to take into account the perspective of another person. In addition, the number of cultures that participants were exposed to, regardless of whether the participant was bilingual or not, was also associated with ToM performance. Overall, the findings suggest that linguistic and cultural experience have an impact on ToM.

The Relationship between Theory of Mind and Intelligence: A Formative g Approach

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability understand that other people’s mental states may be different from one’s own. Psychometric models have shown that individual differences in ToM can largely be attributed to general intelligence (g) (Coyle et al. 2018). Most psychometric models specify g as a reflective latent variable, which is interpreted as a general ability that plays a causal role in a broad range of cognitive tasks, including ToM tasks. However, an alternative approach is to specify g as a formative latent variable, that is, an overall index of cognitive ability that does not represent a psychological attribute (Kovacs and Conway 2016). Here we consider a formative g approach to the relationship between ToM and intelligence. First, we conducted an SEM with reflective g to test the hypothesis that ToM is largely accounted for by a general ability. Next, we conducted a model with formative g to determine whether the relationship between ToM and intelligence is influenced by domain-specific tasks. Finally, we conducted a redundancy analysis to examine the contribution of each g variable. Results suggest that the relationship between ToM and intelligence in this study was influenced by language-based tasks, rather than solely a general ability.

The Impact of a Human Figure in a Scene on Spatial Descriptions in Speech, Gesture, and Gesture Alone

The presence of a human figure in a scene appears to change how people describe it. About 20% of participants take the human figure's viewpoint (Tversky and Hard in Cognition 110:124-129, 2009. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.10.008). Five exploratory studies compare descriptions of a scene with no person to descriptions of a scene with a person. About 20% of participants are predicted to use the person's point of view in the "person" conditions. Study 1 replicates the original pattern. Study 2 shows that the pattern holds when object/scene are changed, and that the figure's gaze towards/away from the object does not change the pattern. Studies 3 and 4 show the pattern holds when the object has different positions and when it is moving. Study 5 shows the pattern holds when the describer is talking to an interlocutor, in both speech and co-speech gesture, and when the person is using gesture alone. The presence of a human figure in a scene appears to be a robust variable in shaping spatial descriptions.

Beyond the Spoken Word: Examining the Nature of Teacher Gesturing in the Context of an Elementary Engineering Curriculum for English-Learner Students

Our research team performed an exploratory analysis of teacher gesturing via a case study of an elementary teacher. We focused on gesturing, a practice found to support both bilingual English learner students' linguistic development and mathematics achievement, during the teacher's engineering and science lessons. The research team systematically analyzed teacher video data using McNeill's gestural dimensions framework and found variation of gesturing types and rates when comparing engineering and baseline science lessons. Additionally, specific types of teacher-gestures appear to be associated with either behavioral or classroom management practices, procedural instructions, and discussion facilitation. We suggest that teacher-gestures such as these have the potential to facilitate bilingual English learners' language acquisition, while also developing their STEM literacy in general and engineering capacity in particular. Further exploration of teacher-gestures in elementary engineering curricula could lead to an integrated STEM pedagogy that incorporates gesturing as a fundamental teaching strategy, bridging STEM instruction with linguistically responsive instructional practices.

The Impact of Brown on EL Students: Addressing Linguistic and Educational Rights Through School Leadership Practice and Preparation

In 1974, the Supreme Court drew on the 1954 Brown decision in Lau v Nichols, placing English learner (EL) students' right to a meaningful education at the forefront of educational policy. Subsequent federal decisions and legislation (i.e., Castañeda; Equal Educational Opportunities Act [EEOA], No Child Left Behind [NCLB], and Every Student Succeeds Act [ESSA]) have placed the responsibility for providing quality educational programming on districts, schools, and school leaders. In this article, we propose a framework for the integration of linguistic equity in leadership preparation and an historical case of a university-based principal preparation program that has integrated this framework into coursework and clinical experiences.

Investigating the foreign language effect as a mitigating influence on the ‘optimality bias’ in moral judgements

Bilinguals often display reduced emotional resonance their second language (L2) and therefore tend to be less prone to decision-making biases in their L2 (e.g., Costa et al. in Cognition 130(2):236–254, 2014a, PLoS One 9(4):1–7, 2014b)—a phenomenon coined Foreign Language Effect (FLE). The present pre-registered experiments investigated whether FLE can mitigate a special case of cognitive bias, called optimality bias, which occurs when observers erroneously blame actors for making “suboptimal” choices, even when there was not sufficient information available for the actor to identify the best choice (De Freitas and Johnson in J Exp Soc Psychol 79:149–163, 2018. 10.1016/j.jesp.2018.07.011). In Experiment 1, L1 English speakers (N = 63) were compared to L2 English speakers from various L1 backgrounds (N = 56). In Experiment 2, we compared Finnish bilinguals completing the study in either Finnish (L1, N = 103) or English (L2, N = 108). Participants read a vignette describing the same tragic outcome resulting from either an optimal or suboptimal choice made by a hypothetical actor with insufficient knowledge. Their blame attributions were measured using a 4-item scale. A strong optimality bias was observed; participants assigned significantly more blame in the suboptimal choice conditions, despite being told that the actor did not know which choice was best. However, no clear interaction with language was found. In Experiment 1, bilinguals gave reliably higher blame scores than natives. In Experiment 2, no clear influence of target language was found, but the results suggested that the FLE is actually more detrimental than helpful in the domain of blame attribution. Future research should investigate the benefits of emotional involvement in blame attribution, including factors such as empathy and perspective-taking.

Development of Dyslexia: The Delayed Neural Commitment Framework

It is now evident that explanations of many developmental disorders need to include a network perspective. In earlier work, we proposed that developmental dyslexia (DD) is well-characterized in terms of impaired procedural learning within the language networks, with the cerebellum being the key structure involved. Here, we deepen the analysis to include the child's developmental process of constructing these networks. The "Delayed Neural Commitment (DNC)" framework proposes that, in addition to slower skill acquisition, dyslexic children take longer to build (and to rebuild) the neural networks that underpin the acquisition of reading. The framework provides an important link backwards in time to the development of executive function networks and the earlier development of networks for language and speech. It is consistent with many theories of dyslexia while providing fruitful suggestions for further research at the genetic, brain, cognitive and behavioral levels of explanation. It also has significant implications for assessment and teaching.

Multi-Pattern Visual Statistical Learning in Monolinguals and Bilinguals

To date, the impact of bilingualism on statistical learning remains unclear. Here we test a novel visual statistical learning task that affords simultaneous learning of two types of regularities: co-occurrence regularities between pairs of elements and the co-occurrence of visual features that could define categories. We compared performance by English monolinguals, Spanish-Catalan bilinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals, as previous studies have suggested that bilinguals might be more open than monolinguals to the presence of multiple regularities, though no previous studies have tested the learning of multiple patterns within a single task. We demonstrated that both monolingual and bilingual participants could learn the co-occurrence probabilities and the features that define categories. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to demonstrate that learners can extract co-occurrence regularities along two dimensions in the visual modality. However, we did not detect significant differences in performance across groups. We close by discussing the implications for the growing literature on bilingualism and statistical learning.

Statistical Learning and Bilingualism

Purpose

Over the last 2 decades, research on statistical learning has demonstrated its importance in supporting language development. Notably, most of the research to date has focused on monolingual populations (or has not reported the language background of participants). Several recent studies, however, have begun to focus on the impact of bilingualism on statistical learning. To date, the results have been quite mixed, with a handful of studies finding differences between monolinguals and bilinguals and several other studies reporting no differences. Thus, the purpose of this manuscript is to review the literature to date on how bilingualism impacts statistical learning abilities.

Method

We review the contemporary literature, organized by the age of participants and by task when relevant.

Conclusions

We note that there are many discrepant findings within this nascent field, although some trends have emerged. For instance, differences in performance may be attributed to factors such as age of acquisition. However, we note that the state of the field does not yet permit firm clinical recommendations.

Another bilingual advantage? Perception of talker-voice information

A bilingual advantage has been found in both cognitive and social tasks. In the current study, we examine whether there is a bilingual advantage in how children process information about who is talking (talker-voice information). Younger and older groups of monolingual and bilingual children completed the following talker-voice tasks with bilingual speakers: a discrimination task in English and German (an unfamiliar language), and a talker-voice learning task in which they learned to identify the voices of three unfamiliar speakers in English. Results revealed effects of age and bilingual status. Across the tasks, older children performed better than younger children and bilingual children performed better than monolingual children. Improved talker-voice processing by the bilingual children suggests that a bilingual advantage exists in a social aspect of speech perception, where the focus is not on processing the linguistic information in the signal, but instead on processing information about who is talking.

Comparing working memory in bilingual and monolingual Hispanic/Latino preschoolers with disruptive behavior disorders

The current study examined differences in working memory (WM) between monolingual and bilingual Hispanic/Latino preschoolers with disruptive behavior disorders (DBDs). A total of 149 children (Mage = 5.10 years, SD = 0.53; 76% male) with elevated levels of DBDs, as indicated by their parents or teachers, were recruited to participate in an 8-week summer program prior to the start of kindergarten (Summer Treatment Program for Pre-Kindergarteners). Prior to the start of treatment, parents completed several measures about their children's behavior and executive function, and children were administered two subtests of the Automated Working Memory Assessment to examine their current WM capabilities. After controlling for demographic variables (i.e., age, sex, socioeconomic status, IQ, and diagnostic status), no significant differences were observed between bilingual and monolingual children in verbal WM performance (β = .03, p > .05). However, children who were bilingual did perform better than monolinguals on spatial WM tasks (β = .23, p < .01). Finally, parent reports of WM corroborated these findings such that bilingual children were reported as having fewer WM problems by parents (β = -.19, p < .05) and teachers (β = -.22, p < .05). Whereas WM deficits are often found among children with DBDs, the current findings suggest that bilingualism may serve as a protective factor for preschoolers with DBDs.

The bilingual adaptation: How minds accommodate experience

According to some estimates, more than half of the world's population is multilingual to some extent. Because of the centrality of language use to human experience and the deep connections between linguistic and nonlinguistic processing, it would not be surprising to find that there are interactions between bilingualism and cognitive and brain processes. The present review uses the framework of experience-dependent plasticity to evaluate the evidence for systematic modifications of brain and cognitive systems that can be attributed to bilingualism. The review describes studies investigating the relation between bilingualism and cognition in infants and children, younger and older adults, and patients, using both behavioral and neuroimaging methods. Excluded are studies whose outcomes focus primarily on linguistic abilities because of their more peripheral contribution to the central question regarding experience-dependent changes to cognition. Although most of the research discussed in the review reports some relation between bilingualism and cognitive or brain outcomes, several areas of research, notably behavioral studies with young adults, largely fail to show these effects. These discrepancies are discussed and considered in terms of methodological and conceptual issues. The final section proposes an account based on "executive attention" to explain the range of research findings and to set out an agenda for the next steps in this field. (PsycINFO Database Record

Narrative abilities of monolingual and bilingual children with and without language impairment: implications for clinical practice

BACKGROUND

Understanding and expressing a narrative's macro-structure is relatively independent of experience in a specific language. A narrative task is therefore assumed to be a less biased method of language assessment for bilingual children than many other norm-referenced tests and may thus be particularly valuable to identify language impairment (LI) in a bilingual context.

AIMS

The present study aimed to investigate the effects of LI and bilingualism on macrostructural narrative skills. Moreover, it evaluated the diagnostic validity of a narrative task within a monolingual and bilingual sample.

METHODS & PROCEDURES

Five- and 6-year-old mono- and bilingual children with and without LI (N = 33 per group) were tested on production and comprehension measures of narrative macro-structure. A multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) was used to investigate the effects of LI and bilingualism on their narrative abilities. Binary logistic regressions were conducted to evaluate the instrument's diagnostic value.

OUTCOMES & RESULTS

Negative effects of LI were found on all narrative measures, whereas no effects of bilingualism emerged. The narrative task adequately differentiated between both mono- and bilingual children with and without LI, with story elements related to internal states being more effective than elements related to the basic episode structure.

CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS

This study confirms the hypothesis that measures of narrative macro-structure are not biased against children who have less experience with a particular language, like bilinguals. In addition, it indicates that using narratives to assess children's language abilities can support the identification of LI in both a monolingual and a bilingual context.

Supporting the home language of bilingual children with developmental disabilities: From knowing to doing

There is a growing awareness of bilingualism and the needs of children with developmental disabilities who are exposed to more than one language. This growing awareness is paralleled by a growing research base in the area of bilingualism and emerging research in bilingual children with developmental disabilities. In this set of articles we see that there is general agreement that bilingualism does not increase risk for language impairment nor does intervention in the home language interfere with second language learning. Yet there continues to be challenges in putting this knowledge into practice. By better understanding the challenges to implementation in context we can better address the needs of children, families, and practitioners.

Why are bilinguals better than monolinguals at false-belief tasks?

In standard Theory of Mind tasks, such as the Sally-Anne, children have to predict the behaviour of a mistaken character, which requires attributing the character a false belief. Hundreds of developmental studies in the last 30 years have shown that children under 4 fail standard false-belief tasks. However, recent studies have revealed that bilingual children and adults outperform their monolingual peers in this type of tasks. Bilinguals' better performance in false-belief tasks has generally been interpreted as a result of their better inhibitory control; that is, bilinguals are allegedly better than monolinguals at inhibiting the erroneous response to the false-belief question. In this review, I challenge the received view and argue instead that bilinguals' better false-belief performance results from more effective attention management. This challenge ties in with two independent lines of research: on the one hand, recent studies on the role of attentional processes in false-belief tasks with monolingual children and adults; and on the other, current research on bilinguals' performance in different Executive Function tasks. The review closes with an exploratory discussion of further benefits of bilingual cognition to Theory of Mind development and pragmatics, which may be independent from Executive Function.

Exposure to multiple languages enhances communication skills in infancy

Early exposure to multiple languages can enhance children's communication skills, even when children are effectively monolingual (Fan, Liberman, Keysar & Kinzler, ). Here we report evidence that the social benefits of multilingual exposure emerge in infancy. Sixteen-month-old infants participated in a communication task that required taking a speaker's perspective to understand her intended meaning. Infants were presented with two identical toys, such as two cars. One toy was mutually visible to both the infant and the speaker, but the other was visible only to the infant and was blocked from the speaker's view by an opaque barrier. The speaker requested the mutually visible toy and we evaluated whether infants understood the speaker's request. Whereas monolingual infants were at chance in choosing between the two toys, infants with multilingual exposure reliably chose the toy the speaker requested. Successful performance was not related to the degree of exposure to other languages, suggesting that even minimal multilingual exposure may enhance communication skills.

Cognitive adaptations induced by a multi-language input in early development

Children around the world successfully adapt to the specific requirements of their physical and social environment, and they readily acquire any language they are exposed to. Still, learning simultaneously two languages has been a continuous concern of parents, educators and scientists. While the focus has shifted from the possible costs to the possible advantages of bilingualism, the worries still linger that early bilingualism may cause delays and confusion. Here we adopt a less dichotomist view, by asking what specific adaptations might result from simultaneously learning two languages. We will discuss findings that point to a surprising plasticity of the cognitive system allowing young infants to cope with the bilingual input and reaching linguistic milestones at the same time as monolinguals.

The Exposure Advantage: Early Exposure to a Multilingual Environment Promotes Effective Communication

Early language exposure is essential to developing a formal language system, but may not be sufficient for communicating effectively. To understand a speaker's intention, one must take the speaker's perspective. Multilingual exposure may promote effective communication by enhancing perspective taking. We tested children on a task that required perspective taking to interpret a speaker's intended meaning. Monolingual children failed to interpret the speaker's meaning dramatically more often than both bilingual children and children who were exposed to a multilingual environment but were not bilingual themselves. Children who were merely exposed to a second language performed as well as bilingual children, despite having lower executive-function scores. Thus, the communicative advantages demonstrated by the bilinguals may be social in origin, and not due to enhanced executive control. For millennia, multilingual exposure has been the norm. Our study shows that such an environment may facilitate the development of perspective-taking tools that are critical for effective communication.

Bilingualism and the Development of Executive Function: The Role of Attention

This paper reviews research examining the effect of bilingualism on children's cognitive development, and in particular, executive function. Studies reporting bilingual advantages in various tasks are described with the purpose of identifying the process or executive function component that might be responsible for this bilingual advantage. Several possibilities are discussed, such as inhibitory control. Finally, the role of attention is proposed as a fundamental process that initiates developmental differences in bilingual children from as early as infancy.

Does bilingual experience affect early visual perceptual development?

Visual attention and perception develop rapidly during the first few months after birth, and these behaviors are critical components in the development of language and cognitive abilities. Here we ask how early bilingual experiences might lead to differences in visual attention and perception. Experiments 1–3 investigated the looking behavior of monolingual and bilingual infants when presented with social (Experiment 1), mixed (Experiment 2), or non-social (Experiment 3) stimuli. In each of these experiments, infants' dwell times (DT) and number of fixations to areas of interest (AOIs) were analyzed, giving a sense of where the infants looked. To examine how the infants looked at the stimuli in a more global sense, Experiment 4 combined and analyzed the saccade data collected in Experiments 1–3. There were no significant differences between monolingual and bilingual infants' DTs, AOI fixations, or saccade characteristics (specifically, frequency, and amplitude) in any of the experiments. These results suggest that monolingual and bilingual infants process their visual environments similarly, supporting the idea that the substantial cognitive differences between monolinguals and bilinguals in early childhood are more related to active vocabulary production than perception of the environment.

Probabilistic cognition in two indigenous Mayan groups

Is there a sense of chance shared by all individuals, regardless of their schooling or culture? To test whether the ability to make correct probabilistic evaluations depends on educational and cultural guidance, we investigated probabilistic cognition in preliterate and prenumerate Kaqchikel and K'iche', two indigenous Mayan groups, living in remote areas of Guatemala. Although the tested individuals had no formal education, they performed correctly in tasks in which they had to consider prior and posterior information, proportions and combinations of possibilities. Their performance was indistinguishable from that of Mayan school children and Western controls. Our results provide evidence for the universal nature of probabilistic cognition.

Inhibitory processes in visual perception: a bilingual advantage

Bilingual inhibitory control advantages are well established. An open question is whether inhibitory superiority also extends to visual perceptual phenomena that involve inhibitory processes. This research used ambiguous figures to assess inhibitory bilingual superiority in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old mono- and bilingual children (N=141). Findings show that bilinguals across all ages are superior in inhibiting a prevalent interpretation of an ambiguous figure to perceive the alternative interpretation. In contrast, mono- and bilinguals revealed no differences in understanding that an ambiguous figure can have two distinct referents. Together, these results suggest that early bilingual inhibitory control superiority is also evident in visual perception. Bilinguals' conceptual understanding of figure ambiguity is comparable to that of their monolingual peers.

Independent effects of bilingualism and socioeconomic status on language ability and executive functioning

One hundred and seventy-five children who were 6-years old were assigned to one of four groups that differed in socioeconomic status (SES; working class or middle class) and language background (monolingual or bilingual). The children completed tests of nonverbal intelligence, language tests assessing receptive vocabulary and attention based on picture naming, and two tests of executive functioning. All children performed equivalently on the basic intelligence tests, but performance on the language and executive functioning tasks was influenced by both SES and bilingualism. Middle-class children outperformed working-class children on all measures, and bilingual children obtained lower scores than monolingual children on language tests but higher scores than monolingual children on the executive functioning tasks. There were no interactions with either group factors or task factors. Thus, each of SES and bilingualism contribute significantly and independently to children's development irrespective of the child's level on the other factor.