TY - GEN A1 - Czapka, Sophia A1 - Wotschack, Christiane A1 - Klassert, Annegret A1 - Festman, Julia T1 - A path to the bilingual advantage BT - pairwise matching of individuals T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Matching participants (as suggested by Hope, 2015) may be one promising option for research on a potential bilingual advantage in executive functions (EF). In this study we first compared performances in three EF-tasks of a naturally heterogeneous sample of monolingual (n = 69, age = 9.0 y) and multilingual children (n = 57, age = 9.3 y). Secondly, we meticulously matched participants pairwise to obtain two highly homogeneous groups to rerun our analysis and investigate a potential bilingual advantage. The initally disadvantaged multilinguals (regarding socioeconomic status and German lexicon size) performed worse in updating and response inhibition, but similarly in interference inhibition. This indicates that superior EF compensate for the detrimental effects of the background variables. After matching children pairwise on age, gender, intelligence, socioeconomic status and German lexicon size, performances became similar except for interference inhibition. Here, an advantage for multilinguals in the form of globally reduced reaction times emerged, indicating a bilingual executive processing advantage. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 688 KW - executive functions KW - bilingualism KW - interference inhibition KW - pairwise matching KW - primary school children KW - background variables KW - lexicon size Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-469736 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 688 ER -