Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Prior studies have reported that bilingualism enhancescognitive ability due to the regular conflict management oftwo language systems (Bialystok, 2015). Here, we explorewhether infant bilingualism improves cognitive ability at 9.5months. Twenty-four monolingual English and 23 bilingualFrench-English infants were first trained to predict a rewardon the right based on a set of tone-shape rule structure (AABpattern). Infants were later trained to predict a differentreward on the left based on another set of new rule structure(ABB pattern). Correct anticipation of reward locationsindicates successful learning. If bilingualism improvesinfants’ cognitive skills, bilingual infants would be better atlearning a new pattern-reward association. However, we didnot find evidence that bilinguals looked at the correct locationmore than monolinguals or learned the new pattern-rewardassociation faster. Thus, our results suggest bilingualism maynot enhance cognitive ability at 9.5 months, as least using thecurrent paradigm.