Abstract
Purpose:
There is conflicting evidence regarding effects of bilingualism on inhibition, and the mechanisms that might underlie the effects remain unclear. A prominent account views additional demands on structural language use in bilinguals as being at the root of bilingual effects on inhibition. In this study, we tested the novel hypothesis that social-pragmatic skills (alone or together with structural language skills) are associated with inhibition in bilingual children.
Method:
Parents of 114 typically developing 8- to 11-year-old Spanish–English bilingual children completed the Children's Communication Checklist–Second Edition to index social pragmatics and the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function to index executive functioning skills. The Inhibit clinical scale score reflected children's inhibition. Children's language ability was indexed by the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals–Fourth Edition in English and Spanish. Length of bilingualism was operationalized continuously as the length of time children had been exposed to both languages in their lifetime. Moderation analyses tested the effects of structural language, social-pragmatic skills, and length of bilingual experience, and their interactions on inhibition.
Results:
While structural language skills were not associated with inhibition, they moderated the relation between social-pragmatic skills and inhibition, such that children with better social-pragmatic skills demonstrated better inhibition, and this effect was stronger for children with better structural language skills. Furthermore, longer length of bilingual experience was associated with better inhibition, and this effect was not moderated by any other predictor.
Conclusion:
These results confirm a graded relationship between bilingualism and inhibition, and indicate that this association is not qualified by structural language or social-pragmatic skills.
Supplemental Material:
Executive functioning skills (EFs) are the complex cognitive processes that include inhibition, working memory, and shifting (Diamond, 2013). EFs are highly important in development, predicting academic outcomes, and overall educational success (e.g., Blair & Razza, 2007). Therefore, the possibility that bilingualism may enhance the development of EFs is exciting, both theoretically and practically. Among the various aspects and components of EFs, inhibition has received the greatest attention in bilingualism literature (e.g., Bialystok, 1999; Bialystok & Martin, 2004; Declerck & Philipp, 2015; Kroll et al., 2008; Santillán & Khurana, 2018; Verhagen et al., 2017), likely because the theorizing behind the mechanism behind a possible association between bilingualism and inhibition has been the most transparent.
Inhibition refers to the component of EFs involved in controlling interference or maintaining selective attention (Miyake & Friedman, 2012). A prominent account of bilingual effects on inhibition situates the mechanism behind this effect at the level of structural language skills. Specifically, Green's (1998) Inhibitory Control Model states that domain-general inhibitory control skills are recruited by bilinguals for language-specific processing because bilinguals' two languages are co-activated, and language selection entails active inhibition of the nontarget language. The more recent adaptive control hypothesis (Green & Abutalebi, 2013) allocates effects of bilingualism on various control processes, including inhibition, to bilinguals' structural language use and the need to control and manage dual-language activation.
Despite such theorizing, and despite availability of extensive research on the topic, there remain significant gaps in our knowledge of bilingualism and the mechanisms by which it may shape inhibition. First, while many studies have shown an association between bilingualism and inhibition, there is research that finds no bilingual advantages on various EF tasks, including inhibition (e.g., Arizmendi et al., 2018). Most studies on this topic take a group comparison approach, and there is inherent difficulty in comparing bilingual and monolingual samples, because such comparisons are often confounded by variables that correlate with both bilingualism and EFs, such as socioeconomic status (Sebastian-Galles & Santolin, 2020). Second, there is a critical shortage of studies that attempt to empirically test the mechanism by which bilingualism is theorized to influence inhibition (i.e., by its effect on structural language). Group comparisons between bilinguals and monolinguals rarely reveal the reason for a possible bilingual influence, even when group differences are observed.
In this study, we aimed to contribute to the ongoing search for the specific aspects of bilingualism that may impact inhibition. We did this in two ways. First, we took a graded, rather than categorical, approach to bilingualism (in line with calls in the literature, Luk & Bialystok, 2013), and considered the influence of the length of bilingualism on inhibition in a large, diverse sample of bilingual school-age children. Second, we tested a specific, theoretically plausible, mechanism by which bilingualism may influence inhibition—namely, we tested whether the association between bilingualism and inhibition (should it be found) would be influenced by children's structural and social-pragmatic communication skills.
In previous studies, various graded approaches have been implemented to quantify bilingualism. Thus, in prior studies, length of experience (e.g., Poarch & Van Hell, 2012b), but also relative proficiency or language balance (e.g., Casado et al., 2021; Rosselli et al., 2016), age of L2 acquisition (e.g., Keijzer, 2013), and L2 proficiency (e.g., Brenders et al., 2011; Poarch & Van Hell, 2012a) have all been linked to inhibition or to other EF components (such as working memory, e.g., Keijzer, 2013; Rosselli et al., 2016). While all of these can plausibly index how “bilingual” someone is, and while many of these correlate with each other, the length of bilingualism merits strong theoretical attention with respect to inhibition. This variable should capture the extent (over an individual's lifetime) to which inhibition has been practiced in the service of language processing, and within a diverse sample of bilinguals, should index meaningful fluctuations in the degree of experience managing dual-language activation.
Structural language has been the sole focus of theories attempting to link bilingualism and inhibition (e.g., Green, 1998; Green & Abutalebi, 2013; Hilchey & Klein, 2011). Previous studies have provided evidence of a relationship between EFs (with inhibition as one of the EF components examined) and structural language skills in monolingual school-age (e.g., Kaushanskaya et al., 2017) and preschool-age children (e.g., Fuhs & Day, 2011; Kuhn et al., 2016). There have been similar findings linking inhibition and structural language skills in bilingual school-age (e.g., Gangopadhyay et al., 2019; Iluz-Cohen & Armon-Lotem, 2013) and preschool-age children (e.g., Ekerim & Selcuk, 2018). However, an association between structural language and inhibition in and of itself does not necessarily imply that this is the mechanism by which bilingualism may shape inhibition.
One way to probe for this mechanism more precisely, in statistical terms, would be to test a specific hypothesis that the association between bilingualism and inhibition is moderated by structural language. In theoretical terms, one could hypothesize that bilingualism may be associated with inhibition most strongly in children with strong structural language skills, because these children are most capable of managing dual-language activation and are most likely to benefit from practice associated with resolution of competition between their two languages. Indeed, in one of our prior studies, we demonstrated that greater degree of dual-language exposure was associated with better inhibition in children with higher structural language skills, but not in children with lower structural language skills (Crespo et al., 2019). Thus, there is precedent for hypothesizing a relationship between bilingualism and inhibition that would be moderated by children's structural language skills, although to our knowledge, this specific hypothesis has not yet been empirically tested. Another novel aspect of our study is that we consider the role of social-pragmatic skills in addition to structural language skills in influencing the relationship between bilingualism and inhibition.
While demands on structural language may be implicated in the link between bilingualism and inhibition, another possibility is that bilingualism shapes inhibitory control in bilinguals through its influence on social-pragmatic skills. Social-pragmatic communication skills are the behaviors used to communicate in social environments (Levinson, 1983). Social-pragmatic communication is a logical place to search for a link between bilingualism and inhibition because it has been linked to both bilingualism (e.g., Genesee et al., 1975) and to inhibition (e.g., Berguno & Bowler, 2004; Bialystok & Senman, 2004; Goetz, 2003). There is evidence of superior social-pragmatic skills in bilingual children compared to monolingual children (e.g., Barac et al., 2014; Cheung et al., 2010; Greenberg et al., 2013; Yow & Markman, 2011; Yow & Markman, 2015). At the same time, better inhibition skills have been linked with better social-pragmatic communication in different populations of children, including typically developing children (Blain-Brière et al., 2014; Hwa-Froelich & Matsuo, 2019), children with autism (Filipe et al., 2020; Reisinger, 2008), and children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (Rints et al., 2015).
In this study, we considered the possibility that a relationship between social-pragmatic skills and inhibition would also be observed in typically developing bilingual children. Indeed, this relationship between social-pragmatics and inhibition may be especially salient for bilingual children, who must pay increased attention to pragmatic cues in their environment because of the presence of two languages (e.g., Brojde et al., 2012). It may be that social-pragmatic skills (alone or together with structural language skills) are associated with inhibition in bilingual children, and that the relationship between bilingualism and inhibitory control is moderated by social-pragmatic skills, akin to the hypothesized moderation of the relationship by structural language. For instance, the relationship between bilingualism and inhibition may be especially robust for children with stronger social-pragmatic skills because these children are most capable of deploying inhibitory control while navigating social environments and interpreting pragmatic cues to language membership.
In summary, our specific research questions are as follows: (a) Do structural and social-pragmatic skills predict inhibition skills in bilingual children? and (b) is the relationship between bilingualism and inhibition moderated by structural language and/or social-pragmatic skills? To test these hypotheses, we investigated the relationship among inhibition, bilingual language experience, and social-pragmatic skills in a large, diverse sample of school-age Spanish–English bilingual children. We modeled the independent effects of bilingual experience, structural language, and social-pragmatic skills and their interactions on inhibition. We defined bilingual language experience as the length of time children had been exposed to both languages in their lifetime (see Luk et al., 2011, and Meir & Armon-Lotem, 2013, for a similar approach). Social-pragmatic communication skills were measured via the Children's Communication Checklist–Second Edition (CCC-2; Bishop, 2006). Inhibition was measured with the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF; Roth et al., 2014). Use of a parent report to measure both inhibition and social-pragmatic skills is a strength in that they are ecologically valid measures reflecting parents' perceptions of children's daily functioning.
Method
Participants
Informed consent was obtained from all participants. Participants included 114 typically developing Spanish–English bilingual children (57 boys) 8;0 (years;months) to 11;0 years of age (M age = 9.20 years, SD = 0.97 years) who participated in a larger study involving experimental measures of EFs. The age range was selected to ensure children could complete adultlike experimental measures of executive function. Participants were included if their parents reported normal or corrected vision and if they passed a hearing screening. Parents identified 81 children as White, 1 as Black, 2 as Asian, 14 as other (including biracial). This information was not reported for 33 children. Of the 114 participants, 55 were identified as Hispanic/Latino.
All participants were exposed to both English and Spanish at the time of the study, and we required children have at least 20% exposure to English to participate. Percentage exposure to English was determined based on parent interview, during which a parent completed an hour-by-hour language exposure grid for their child, reporting whether within each hour, the child was exposed to English, Spanish, or both languages. Participants were excluded if they had significant exposure to a language other than English or Spanish (defined as > 5%), and if parents indicated a history of developmental language delay, an organic medical diagnosis, or that their child was receiving language therapy services. Participants were also excluded if they demonstrated below normal nonverbal cognition (performance IQ < 85) to ensure that they could complete adultlike experimental measures of executive function. Information regarding participants' language history, exposure, dominance, and use was collected through parent questionnaires and parent interview. See Table 1 for participant characteristics.
Table 1.
Participant characteristics.
| Variable | M (SD) |
|---|---|
| N | 114 |
| Gender | 57 boys |
| Age (years) | 9.20 (0.97) |
| Mother's years of education | 15.39 (3.81) |
| Age of initial English exposure (months) | 6.53 (13.89) |
| Age of initial Spanish exposure (months) | 28.65 (31.07) |
| Length of bilingualism (years) | 6.27 (2.54) |
| Nonverbal IQ a | 110.87 (13.41) |
| English Core Language b | 101.32 (15.39) |
| English Receptive Language b | 104.47 (14.55) |
| Spanish Core Language c | 85.76 (12.38) |
| Spanish Receptive Language c | 97.20 (11.80) |
| Highest Core Language Score d | 103.69 (12.61) |
| CCC-2 GCC e | 104.63 (12.87) |
| CCC-2 Pragmatics f | 64.53 (10.42) |
| BRIEF GEC g | 47.59 (8.37) |
| BRIEF Inhibition h | 48.37 (8.55) |
Perceptual Reasoning Composite Score from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children–Fourth Edition (WISC-IV; Wechsler, 2003).
Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals–Fourth Edition (CELF-4; Semel et al., 2003).
Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals–Fourth Spanish Edition (CELF-4 Spanish; Wiig et al., 2006).
Highest Core Language Score of English or Spanish Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals–Fourth Edition (CELF-4; Semel et al., 2003; CELF-4 Spanish; Wiig et al., 2006).
Children's Communication Checklist–Second Edition Global Composite Score (CCC-2 GCC; Bishop, 2006).
Children's Communication Checklist–Second Edition (CCC-2; Bishop, 2006) Pragmatics Subscore.
Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function Global Executive Composite (BRIEF GEC; Roth et al., 2014).
Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF; Roth et al., 2014) Inhibit Clinical Scale Score.
Procedure
Participants completed standardized assessments of language and cognition while their parents completed questionnaires and checklists. These data were collected across three sessions as part of a larger study including other tasks and groups. All measures were administered at the same time point.
Parent Tasks
During parent interviews, parents completed questionnaires probing for children's language exposure and experience. Length of bilingual experience was defined as the length of time children had been exposed to both languages. Because exposure to both languages at the time of the study was an inclusionary criterion, all children were exposed to both languages at the time of the study, but there was significant variability in the degree of language exposure within the group. Parents reported the age (in months) that children were first exposed to English and Spanish. We subtracted participants' ages of second language exposure from their current age to index their length of bilingual experience.
Parents completed the CCC-2 (Bishop, 2006), which was developed to provide a quantitative estimate of pragmatic language skills and impairments in children 4–16 years of age. The questionnaire includes 70 items that describe children's behavior (for instance: talks repeatedly about things that no one is interested in) and asks parents to rate each item on a 4-point Likert scale to describe the frequency of behaviors (i.e., never, occasionally, frequently, always). The CCC-2 has been used across diverse populations and has been found to be valid and sensitive to variation in social communication skills (e.g., Norbury et al., 2004; Volden & Phillips, 2010). Test–retest reliability (r) of the CCC-2 is .93. The CCC-2 yields an overall score, the General Communication Composite with test–retest reliability (r) of .96 for 7- to 9-year-olds and .93 for 10- to 16-year-olds. This score aggregates scores across 10 different subscales measuring structural language and pragmatics: speech, syntax, semantics, coherence, initiation, scripted language, context, nonverbal communication, social relations, and interests. To hone in on pragmatics, we excluded structural language subscales (i.e., speech, syntax, semantics, and coherence), and aggregated the other subscales together to index social-pragmatic skills. Internal consistency (r) is .81 for initiation, .75 for scripted language, .81 for context, .77 for nonverbal communication, .77 for social relations, and .69 for interests. A similar approach was implemented in previous studies attempting to dissociate structural language from pragmatic skills in the CCC-2 (see Andrés-Roqueta et al., 2021; Geurts, 2007).
Parents also completed the BRIEF (Roth et al., 2014) to index children's EFs. This standardized measure has 86 items that evaluate executive dysfunction in home and school environments in children and adolescents 5–18 years of age. Parents are asked to answer questions about their child's executive functioning behaviors (an example item is: “gets out of control more than friends”), and to rate each behavior for frequency on a 3-point scale (i.e., never, sometimes, and often). The BRIEF uses T-scores, which have a mean of 50. A higher BRIEF score indicates more deficits in EFs. Scores include a Global Executive Composite and the following clinical scales: Inhibit, Shift, Emotional Control, Initiate, Working Memory, Plan/Organize, Organization of Materials, and Monitor. We focused our analyses on the Inhibit clinical scale as inhibition has been the focus of much work in bilingualism. Test–retest reliability (r) of the Inhibit clinical scale is .84 and internal consistency (α) is .91.
Child Tasks
Participants completed standardized assessments of expressive and receptive language in both English and Spanish as well as a test of nonverbal intelligence. Children's language ability was indexed by the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals–Fourth Edition (CELF-4) in both English (Semel et al., 2003) and Spanish (Wiig et al., 2006). The CELF-4 assesses language abilities and identifies language disorders in children and adults 5–21 years of age. We used the highest Core Language Score (English or Spanish), for structural language ability (in line with Crespo et al., 2019). The Core Language Score measures overall receptive and expressive language skills. Test–retest reliability (r) of the Core Language Score for children 8–11 years of age ranges from .91 to .94 for the English version. The CELF-4 English has 100% sensitivity and 82% specificity for the Core Language Score at 1 SD below the mean, and the CELF-4 Spanish has 96% sensitivity and 87% specificity at 1 SD below the mean. Across ages and subtests, test–retest reliability coefficients range from .52 to .93 for the Spanish version.
The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children–Fourth Edition (WISC-IV; Wechsler, 2003) Perceptual Reasoning Composite Score was used to quantify children's nonverbal intelligence. The WISC-IV assesses intellectual ability in children ages 6–16 years of age and has split-half reliability (r) of .97. The Perceptual Reasoning Composite Score (r = .92) includes the core subtests of Block Design (r = .86), Picture Concepts (r = .82), Matrix Reasoning (r = .89), and the supplementary subtest of Picture Completion (r = .84). Test–retest reliability (r) of the Perceptual Reasoning Score is .90 for 8- to 9-year-olds and .93 for 10- to 11-year-olds.
Results
Statistics were completed using RStudio 1.2.5001 (RStudio Team, 2019), the lmSupport (v2.9.13; Curtin, 2018) and stats (R Core Team, 2019) packages. We estimated a general linear model in which we regressed inhibition skills on the three-way interaction between structural language skills (highest Core Language Score centered), social-pragmatic skills (CCC-2 pragmatics score centered), and length of bilingual experience (centered). All lower order terms were included in the model. The addition of age, F(1, 105) = 0.04, p = .85, mother's years of education, F(1, 105) = 1.56, p = .21, and nonverbal IQ, F(1, 105) = 2.08, p = .85, did not significantly improve model fit and were therefore not included.
The analyses revealed a significant interaction between social-pragmatic skills and structural language abilities, B = −1.67, SE = 0.75, t = −2.23, p < .05, ηp2 = .04, such that children showed better inhibition skills with increased social-pragmatic skills, and this effect was more robust in children with higher structural language abilities (see Table 2). Significant main effects of social-pragmatic skills (B = −3.26, SE = 0.76, t = −4.30, p < .001, ηp2 = .15) and length of bilingual experience (B = −2.11, SE = 0.74, t = −2.85, p < .01, ηp2 = .07) were observed such that increases in social-pragmatic ability and longer bilingual language experience were associated with lower BRIEF Inhibition Index scores, indicating better inhibition skills. All other main effects and interactions were not significant. Notably, the effect of length of bilingual experience on inhibition was independent of children's age. See Supplemental Material S1 for bivariate correlations and Table 2 for full model results.
Table 2.
Full model results with Inhibit clinical scale scores as the outcome.
| Variable | B(SE) | t |
|---|---|---|
| Intercept | 48.70 (0.73) | 66.32*** |
| Structural language skills | 0.69 (0.74) | 0.93 |
| Social-pragmatic skills | −3.26 (0.76) | −4.30*** |
| Length of bilingualism | −2.11 (0.74) | 2.86** |
| Structural Language × Social Pragmatics | −1.67 (0.75) | −2.23* |
| Structural Language × Bilingualism | 0.20 (0.73) | 0.27 |
| Social Pragmatics × Bilingualism | −0.54 (0.73) | −0.73 |
| Structural Language × Social Pragmatics × Bilingualism | 0.99 (0.76) | 1.31 |
| Observations | 114 | |
| R 2 | 0.27 | |
| Adjusted R 2 | 0.22 | |
| Residual standard error | 7.57 (df = 106) | |
| F statistic | 5.47*** (df = 7; 106) |
Note. Lower inhibition scores on the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function are interpreted as stronger inhibition skills.
p < .05.
p < .01.
p < .001.
Discussion
The goal of our study was to test the relationship between bilingualism and inhibition, with the view of examining whether this relationship would be influenced by structural language and social-pragmatic skills. To our surprise, while we did find that length of bilingual experience was associated with inhibition, this effect was not moderated either by structural language skills or by social-pragmatic skills. We did observe a relationship between social-pragmatic communication and inhibition in bilingual children, which was moderated by structural language skills. However, we did not observe an independent relationship between structural language skills and inhibition (unlike, e.g., Iluz-Cohen & Armon-Lotem, 2013).
The finding that length of bilingual language experience was associated with better inhibition skills is in line with prior studies (e.g., Bialystok & Martin, 2004) and suggests that quantifying bilingual experience in graded rather than categorical terms within a large and diverse sample of bilingual children can be an important counterstrategy to the more common group comparison approach (Luk & Bialystok, 2013; Meir & Armon-Lotem, 2013). It is important to note that the cross-sectional nature of our study leaves open the directionality of the relationship between the length of bilingual experience and inhibition skills. While the more traditional view of such an association is that the use of two languages leads to improvements in inhibition (e.g., Bialystok, 2001; Bialystok & Martin, 2004), there is also a possibility that inhibitory control skills are crucial to the development of skills in two languages (Blom, 2019), and promote bilingualism. Indeed, the relationship between bilingualism and inhibition is likely bidirectional, and longitudinal studies of different developmental periods will be crucial for documenting the directionality of this relationship.
Contrary to our hypotheses, we did not observe any moderation effects associated either with structural language or social-pragmatic skills that would influence the relationship between length of bilingual experience and inhibition. We expected that the association between bilingualism and inhibition might be stronger for children with more robust structural language skills and/or social-pragmatic skills, in line with some prior work (Crespo et al., 2019). Such a hypothesis is logical considering the mechanistic explanations for the effects of bilingualism on inhibition, which allocate importance to how language is used, especially in social situations (Abutalebi & Green, 2008). It is possible that other measures of inhibition (e.g., proactive vs. reactive inhibitory control), and other components of EFs (e.g., working memory) may be more sensitive to such interactive effects between bilingualism and language skills, and will be an important direction for our future work.
The finding that better social-pragmatic skills were associated with better inhibition skills suggests a specific relationship between social communication and inhibition in bilingual children, supporting prior findings of such a link in monolingual children (e.g., Im-Bolter et al., 2006; Montgomery, 2002). Interestingly, we also found that the relationship between social-pragmatic skills and inhibition was stronger for children with better structural language abilities. While we did not set out to test this relationship a priori, the finding indicates that the process by which social-pragmatic functioning and inhibition relate to each other depends on the strength of the structural language system. Critically, structural language skills alone were not associated with inhibition in our study, suggesting that capturing both structural language and social-pragmatic skills may be crucial to the search for mechanisms that shape inhibition skills in bilinguals.
It is important to consider that our measures for both social-pragmatic skills and inhibition were obtained from parent reports. While a few prior studies of bilingual EFs have utilized the BRIEF, a much more common approach has been to use tightly controlled experimental tasks of EFs. From our perspective, both approaches are useful in the search for the mechanisms that drive the bilingualism-EF relationship. Whereas the BRIEF (and other self-report measures) provides an ecologically valid insight into children's daily use of EFs, experimental tasks are free of self-report biases, and ultimately, a combination of experimental and observation/self-report methods may be best suited to capture children's EFs.
In conclusion, we demonstrated a relationship between social-pragmatic skills and inhibition as well as length of bilingualism and inhibition in bilingual children. Although these effects were independent from each other in our sample, it is possible that for bilinguals who occupy a different social-cultural environment, inhibitory control skills may be shaped by a more interdependent relationship between bilingual experience and social-pragmatic skills. For instance, in settings where most speakers are bilingual and use their two languages within the same social milieus, the need to rely on social-pragmatic skills to navigate the social environment may be higher, and the relationship among inhibition, structural language, social-pragmatic skills, and bilingualism may operate differently than in this study. Future studies probing for the relationships among bilingualism, structural language, social-pragmatic skills, and inhibition in other populations of bilingual children would therefore be an important step in the search for the mechanisms that drive the effects of bilingualism on executive functions.
Data Availability Statement
The materials, data, and analysis code referred to in this article are available online (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/3QTVP).
Supplementary Material
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants R01 DC011750 and R01 DC016015. The authors thank all the members of the Language Acquisition and Bilingualism Lab for their assistance with data collection, scoring, and data coding. Finally, they deeply appreciate all of the children and parents who participated in the study.
Funding Statement
This research was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants R01 DC011750 and R01 DC016015.
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Data Availability Statement
The materials, data, and analysis code referred to in this article are available online (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/3QTVP).
