Our project is entitled ‘Referential
communication and executive function skills in bilingual children’. This is
a two-year project directed by researchers at the University of Leeds and the
University of Manchester, and funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The aim of the project is to improve
our understanding about the developmental differences between monolingual and
bilingual children, on the basis of experimental research.
Previous
research has shown that bilingual children perform better than comparable
monolinguals on certain cognitive tasks requiring control of attention. This
bilingual advantage may possibly be attributed to their experience of managing
several languages on a daily basis, which is an excellent practice for setting
attention priorities. Another line of research has shown that attention control
abilities predict referential communication abilities in monolingual children:
those who are better at attention control are also better at taking their
interlocutor’s perspective into account (and this determines the choice of
referential expressions, such as “he” or “the boy”).
We aim to bring together these two lines of research, by investigating
the links between cognitive development, bilingualism, and referential
abilities. In particular, we want to explore these links in bilingual
children with uneven exposure to their two languages (as this is a group that
has not been studied sufficiently).
Significance
of the project
In
England, 15.2% of the primary school population has a mother tongue other than
English. Yet, in an increasingly multicultural UK society we still know very
little about the linguistic and cognitive skills of children growing up with
more than one language.
Our work will provide new evidence
on the linguistic and cognitive profiles of bilingual children in a typical
multilingual classroom in the UK and raise awareness about the impact of
different types of bilingual environments. More specifically, we will provide
the evidence needed to develop a better understanding of the abilities of
heritage children, which form a growing part of the school population.
