TY  - JOUR
A1  - Czapka, Sophia
A1  - Festman, Julia
T1  - Wisconsin Card Sorting Test reveals a monitoring advantage but not a switching advantage in multilingual children
T2  - Journal of experimental child psychology : JECP
N2  - The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) is used to test higher-level executive functions or switching, depending on the measures chosen in a study and its goal. Many measures can be extracted from the WCST, but how to assign them to specific cognitive skills remains unclear. Thus, the current study first aimed at identifying which measures test the same cognitive abilities. Second, we compared the performance of mono- and multilingual children in the identified abilities because there is some evidence that bilingualism can improve executive functions. We tested 66 monolingual and 56 multilingual (i.e., bi- and trilingual) primary school children (M-age = 109 months) in an online version of the classic WCST. A principal component analysis revealed four factors: problem-solving, monitoring, efficient errors, and perseverations. Because the assignment of measures to factors is only partially coherent across the literature, we identified this as one of the sources of task impurity. In the second part, we calculated regression analyses to test for group differences while controlling for intelligence as a predictor for executive functions and for confounding variables such as age, German lexicon size, and socioeconomic status. Intelligence predicted problem solving and perseverations. In the monitoring component (measured by the reaction times preceding a rule switch), multilinguals outperformed monolinguals, thereby supporting the view that bi- or multilingualism can improve processing speed related to monitoring.
KW  - Executive functions
KW  - Switching
KW  - Monitoring
KW  - Multilingualism
KW  - Factor
KW  - analysis
KW  - Bilingual advantage
Y1  - 2021
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/57842
SN  - 0022-0965
SN  - 1096-0457
VL  - 204
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -