The effect of bilingualism on letter and category fluency tasks in primary school children: Advantage or disadvantage?
- 6 October 2010
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
- Vol. 15 (2), 351-364
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s1366728910000192
Abstract
The aim of the current study was to examine the effects of bilingualism on letter and category fluency tasks. Participants were 1,600 monolingual and bilingual children from three cities in Iran: Tehran (Persian monolinguals), Tabriz (Turkish–Persian bilinguals), and Sanandaj (Kurdish–Persian bilinguals). We separately presented nine Persian letters and thirty-one categories to the participants, and asked them to generate as many words as possible using each of these initial letters and categories within a maximum of three minutes. Bilingual children generated more words than monolingual children in the letter fluency task; this effect was more pronounced in Grade 1 and for Turkish–Persian bilinguals. However, Persian monolinguals generated significantly more words than both bilingual groups in the category fluency task. Thus, bilingualism can be of both advantage and disadvantage, and produce a dissociative effect. We discuss the results on the basis of the specific nature and different cognitive demands of letter and category fluency tasks. We suggest that the degree of language proficiency of bilinguals should be considered as an important variable in future research on bilingualism.Keywords
This publication has 46 references indexed in Scilit:
- Lexical access in bilinguals: Effects of vocabulary size and executive controlJournal of Neurolinguistics, 2008
- The effect of childhood bilingualism on episodic and semantic memory tasksScandinavian Journal of Psychology, 2008
- Easier Tasks Can Have Better Discriminating Power: The Case of Verbal Fluency.Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2005
- Developing phonological awareness: Is there a bilingual advantage?Applied Psycholinguistics, 2003
- Episodic and semantic memory in bilingual and monolingual childrenScandinavian Journal of Psychology, 2003
- Verbal and Figural Fluency in Patients with Mass Lesions of the Left or Right Frontal LobesJournal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 1999
- Letter and category fluency in community-dwelling canadian seniors: A comparison of normal participants to those with dementia of the Alzheimer or vascular typeJournal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 1997
- Episodic and Semantic Memory: A Comparison of Amnesic and Demented PatientsJournal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 1987
- A Review of the Literature on the Effects of Bilingualism upon the Measurement of IntelligenceThe Pedagogical Seminary and Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1953
- Some effects of bilingualism upon the intelligence test performance of Puerto Rican children in New York City.Journal of Educational Psychology, 1953