The effects of bilingualism on problem solving ability

This study examined the effects of differing degrees of bilingualism on problem solving abilities in children in grade three. Three linguistic groups were compared on problem solving tasks designed to measure control of attention or analysis of knowledge, previously shown to develop differently in monolingual and bilingual children solving linguistic problems (Bialystok, 1988). An English speaking monolingual group was compared with a French-English bilingual group and a Bengali-English bilingual group. Subjects were similar except for their language background. Tests of language proficiency revealed that the French-English subjects were balanced bilinguals and the Bengali-English subjects were partial bilinguals because their Bengali was relatively weak. Both the bilingual groups showed higher levels of control of attention than the monolingual group on a linguistic task which asked subjects to judge the grammaticality of sentences. The balanced French-English bilinguals showed superior performance on the non-linguistic tasks requiring control of attention than both the partial bilingual group and the monolingual group. There were no differences found between groups on the non-linguistic task requiring analysis of representational structures. These results suggest that bilinguals have a higher level of control of attention than monolinguals when solving linguistic problems and that a higher degree of bilingualism allows the child to be able to use the higher levels of control in more generalized situations.