From memory flexibility to cognitive flexibility: Examining precursors to bilingual advantages during early childhood

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Two-thirds of the world's children are raised in homes where multiple languages are spoken. Children who learn two or more languages exhibit what appear to be lifelong cognitive advantages relative to those who learn only one language. In particular, bilingual children show heightened cognitive flexibility, defined as the ability to adjust their behaviors in response to changes in task demands, and inhibit their attention to irrelevant information. Cognitive flexibility is critical to educational success. The proposed studies will examine whether advantages in memory processing during infancy can explain bilingual children's heightened cognitive flexibility later in childhood. A better understanding of how and why bilingualism enhances cognitive flexibility will allow educators to develop pedagogical strategies to capitalize on bilingualism's protective cognitive strengths. This may be especially important for bilingual children from low income families who show an achievement gap relative to their middle class, monolingual peers. Memory inference and memory flexibility will be tested in 1- and 2-year-old monolingual and bilingual children and these same children will be tested at 3- and 5-years on cognitive flexibility. Memory flexibility involves the ability to recognize similarities between objects based on how they function rather than how they look, which involves the ability to shift between cues. Memory interference occurs when competing cues disrupt memory encoding, and reduction of interference requires inhibition of conflicting cues. It is predicted that longitudinal analyses will show that bilingual infants have greater memory flexibility and less memory interference than monolinguals, which will predict enhanced cognitive flexibility at both 3 and 5 years. In addition, the PI is committed to training graduate and undergraduate students and will recruit bilingual students for their unique linguistic skills; the project is therefore likely to train minority students who are underrepresented in STEM fields.