Cognitive and Language development in bilingual children

双语儿童的认知和语言发展

• 批准号: 8073130
• 负责人: Ellen Bialystok
• 金额: $ 20.12万
• 依托单位: YORK UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-05-10 至 2012-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8073130
• 关键词: 10 year old; Accounting; Achievement; Address; Adult; Affect; Age; American; Area; Attention; Behavior; Brain; Censuses; Cerebral cortex; Child; Child Development; Client; Cognition; Cognitive; Competence; Complex; Conceptions; Country; Data; Development; Disadvantaged; Disease; Education; Environment; European; European Union; Face; Goals; Growth; Home environment; Immigration; Instruction; Intervention; Investigation; Language; Language Development; Lead; Learning; Linguistics; Measures; Mind; Modeling; Monitor; Occupations; Outcome; Performance; Plastics; Play; Policies; Population; Prevalence; Problem Solving; Process; Psycholinguistics; Reading; Reporting; Research; Research Personnel; Role; Schools; Science; Semantics; Seminal; Short-Term Memory; Social Class; Societies; Solutions; Source; Structure; System; Thinking; Vocabulary; autism spectrum disorder; base; bilingualism; cognitive function; cognitive system; cost; executive function; expectation; experience; literacy; peer; programs; response; selective attention; semantic processing; skills; social; socioeconomics; success

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The broad goal is to investigate the ways in which bilingualism affects children's cognitive and linguistic development. Four specific aims each examines a different aspect of competence. The first aim is to investigate the cognitive effects of bilingualism on executive processing and develop more precise descriptions of the relationship between selective attention, inhibitory control, response suppression, and task switching. Executive functions are the basis of all higher thinking, including planning, attention, and monitoring. The second aim is to examine the extent to which bilingualism affects children's development of higher cognitive abilities in spatial and mathematical domains. Both are crucial aspects of children's development and integrally related to school achievement. The results will help to identify the basic skills that underlie problem solving in these domains and point to an important academic consequence of bilingualism. The third aim is to examine the effect of bilingualism on language development, specifically in terms of semantic processing and literacy acquisition. It is well known that bilingual children control a smaller vocabulary in each language than their monolingual counterparts. The effect of this difference on psycholinguistic processing and higher language skills, such as literacy, needs to be examined in detail for these children. Literacy acquisition is multifaceted, depending on both cognitive and semantic abilities, suggesting a complex role for bilingualism in its development. The fourth aim is to isolate the factors that are correlated with bilingualism, such as social class, education, cultural expectations, and immigration, that may be accounting for the results rather than bilingualism per se. Monolingual and bilingual children have many different experiences, so it is essential to demonstrate that the relevant source of difference on these tasks is only the number of languages they speak. The research for all these aims will compare monolinguals and bilinguals matched on SES, working memory, and reasoning ability, on the dependent measure selected for each specific aim. All these outcomes relate to children's intellectual development and school success and will contribute to theoretical conceptions of the structure of these abilities. The results will be used to understand how language experience affects development for a specific group of children and how the plasticity of the mind is responsive to social and linguistic contingencies in the environment.

描述（由申请人提供）：总体目标是调查双语影响儿童认知和语言发展的方式。四个具体目标分别考察能力的不同方面。第一个目标是研究双语对执行处理的认知影响，并对选择性注意、抑制控制、反应抑制和任务切换之间的关系进行更精确的描述。执行功能是所有高级思维的基础，包括计划、注意力和监控。第二个目的是研究双语对儿童在空间和数学领域的高级认知能力的发展的影响程度。两者都是儿童发展的重要方面，并且与学校成绩密切相关。研究结果将有助于确定这些领域解决问题的基本技能，并指出双语的重要学术成果。第三个目标是研究双语对语言发展的影响，特别是在语义处理和识字习得方面。众所周知，双语儿童在每种语言中掌握的词汇量比单语儿童少。需要对这些儿童详细研究这种差异对心理语言处理和读写能力等高级语言技能的影响。识字能力的获得是多方面的，取决于认知和语义能力，这表明双语在其发展中发挥着复杂的作用。第四个目标是隔离与双语相关的因素，例如社会阶层、教育、文化期望和移民，这些因素可能是造成结果的原因，而不是双语本身。单语和双语儿童有许多不同的经历，因此有必要证明这些任务的差异的相关来源只是他们所说的语言数量。针对所有这些目标的研究将比较单语者和双语者在社会经济地位、工作记忆和推理能力方面的匹配情况，以及为每个特定目标选择的相关衡量标准。所有这些结果都与儿童的智力发展和学业成功有关，并将有助于这些能力结构的理论概念。研究结果将用于了解语言经验如何影响特定儿童群体的发展，以及思维的可塑性如何对环境中的社会和语言突发事件做出反应。