UC Merced

There is a long-standing debate about whether bilinguals have enhanced executive function abilities due to regularly managing two languages and thus constantly activating brain regions responsible for executive control. This dissertation presents four studies investigating the impact of bilingualism on executive function abilities. Chapter 1 provides an argument towards an integration of hotter executive function measures regarding the bilingual advantage debate. Chapter 2 used secondary data to analyze the development of bilingual children’s executive function overtime in a longitudinal study across several time points from ages five to seven. Findings indicate that bilingual and monolingual children are different in some ways, such as their rate of change on cognitive control. Additionally, teachers rated bilingual children as having better inhibitory control and attention skills at the start of kindergarten in comparison to monolingual children, which may be reflective of hot executive function skills. Chapter 3 expands upon the results of Chapter 2 by examining how the teachers rated eight-year-old children’s hot executive function skills, internalizing and externalizing problems and interpersonal skills. The results paralleled those found in Chapter 2. Next, Chapter 4 follows up and expands the prior studies through investigating hot executive function skills among bilingual undergraduates via a computerized executive function task that implements affective stimuli. Chapter 5 examines whether bilingual and monolingual children differ on hot and cool executive function tasks that differ on their interpersonal level (2 tasks that are interpersonal and 2 tasks that are intrapersonal) and furthermore how these tasks relate to a novel ecological hot executive function task. Our novel child friendly computerized executive function task with affective stimuli directly contrasts neutral stimuli of a pre-existing executive function task. Additionally, Chapter 5 includes extensive information regarding the child’s background, language experience and exposure. This collection of studies aims to provide evidence for how bilingualism relates to executive function using a holistic multimethod approach including, a longitudinal design, non-affective and affective executive function tasks, teacher reports and parent reports. Theoretical and methodological implications, as well as limitations of the studies in this dissertation are discussed.