Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children enrolled in language-immersion programmes may be required to learn math in the immersion language. Fol-lowing the framework of the Pathways Model (LeFevre et al., 2010; Sowinski et al., 2014), the goal of the present studywas to understand how instructional language supports math learning by comparing patterns of performance of immersionand non-immersion students. Participants included 182 grade 2 students (Mean age= 7.8 years): 108 students were en-rolled in French immersion programs and were learning math in French (their second language) and 74 were enrolled innon-immersion programs and were learning math in English (their home language). Participants were tested on a numberof general cognitive measures as well as math specific outcome measures. Results show that overall, across both immer-sion and non-immersion students, linguistic, quantitative and working memory components contributed to math problemsolving. However, within the linguistic component there were differences between the direct and indirect pathways.