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Facing Diversity in Child Foreign Language Education pp 17–37Cite as

Cognition and Second Language Experience: How Are Executive Function and Second Language Acquisition Related?

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Part of the book series: Second Language Learning and Teaching ((SLLT))

Abstract

Bilingual children’s better performance on cognitive tasks has been explained by greater proficiency in executive function (EF) compared with monolingual peers. This is postulated to stem from quality and complexity in their linguistic environment. Many international studies of executive function adopt leading indicators such as academic performance, overall well-being and happiness. This chapter takes a broader view on bilingualism, including child experience of instructed second language (L2) acquisition and research attempts to map relationships between this experience and EF. The focus is on investigations of causality and studies of the bidirectional influence between EF and L2, suggesting that individual childhood differences improve them as L2 learners and that early L2 experience, in turn, commands a lasting influence on EF. The controversy of the claimed bilingual cognitive advantage is also discussed, and methodological issues are raised. A recent call to re-examine EF to include a broader range of the skills relied upon by children to achieve specific goals is briefly introduced with implications for future studies of the EF/L2 relationship.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    During the Simon task, participants are asked to respond as quickly and as accurately as possible to a stimulus, e.g.,: a red or green square, by pressing a key or a button. In congruent trials a response is required with the same laterality as the stimulus presentation and in incongruent trials the response and the stimulus are presented at opposite sides. The Simon Effect is the proportion of incongruent to congruent trials with lower scores indicating a lower switching cost and it is therefore used as an indicator for individual, simple processing speed differences.

  2. 2.

    Goriot et al (2018) showed no relationship between L1/L2 balance and working memory (WM)—contrary to Bloom et al. (2014) for Dutch-Turkish bilinguals—and there is some speculation that if such a relationship between working memory does exist it might exist in more advanced L2 learners. Bilingual advantage in working memory (WM) was not shown by Barac et al. (2014).

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  1. The Centre for Foreign Language Teacher Training and European Education, Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland

    Dorota E. Campfield

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    Joanna Rokita-Jaśkow

  2. Institute of English Philology, Pedagogical University of Kraków, Kraków, Poland

    Agata Wolanin

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Campfield, D.E. (2021). Cognition and Second Language Experience: How Are Executive Function and Second Language Acquisition Related?. In: Rokita-Jaśkow, J., Wolanin, A. (eds) Facing Diversity in Child Foreign Language Education. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66022-2_2

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