TY  - JOUR
A1  - Czapka, Sophia
A1  - Wotschack, Christiane
A1  - Klassert, Annegret
A1  - Festman, Julia
T1  - A path to the bilingual advantage
BT  - pairwise matching of individuals
JF  - Bilingualism : language and cognition
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.
KW  - executive functions
KW  - bilingualism
KW  - interference inhibition
KW  - pairwise
KW  - matching
KW  - primary school children
KW  - background variables
KW  - lexicon size
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000166
SN  - 1366-7289
SN  - 1469-1841
VL  - 23
IS  - 2
SP  - 344
EP  - 354
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - Cambridge
ER  -