Bilingual Children and Their Cognitive Development from Sociolinguistic Point of ‎Views

Abstract

On tasks assessing executive functioning, bilingual children do better than monolinguals, according to numerous research; nevertheless, some studies have not shown any connection between bilingualism and performance. In this study, three groups of 6-to 7-year-old Sindhi bilingual kids were compared to a monolingual control group. Specifically, we wanted to see if the sociolinguistic context of language use affected the bilingual cognitive advantage. A minority language other than the country's major language—Urdu—was introduced to all three bilingual groups. Three multilingual groups were exposed to three different languages: Sindhi, the language of Punjab, and Urdu, the language of the country. ‎Two verbal and visuospatial working memory tasks as well as two attentional tasks were completed by all of the kids. When it came to selective attention, bilingual kids did better than monolingual kids. In the Sindhi-Urdu group and in a subgroup of migrant children who were quite good in Punjabi, the cognitive impact of bilingualism was most evident. In the Udu-Punjabi sample, the effect was not as strong. A study examining the interference suppression test's response patterns revealed that bilingual kids are more likely than monolingual kids to exhibit the effect of response competition, indicating that they pay attention to distinct elements. There was no impact of bilingualism on verbal or visuospatial working memory.