The Impact of Bilingualism on Executive Functioning and Mathematical Abilities Throughout Development

Research suggests that a bilingual advantage is present for domain-general cognitive abilities, such as working memory (López, 2021), leaving it unclear whether an advantage exists for domain-specific abilities (e.g., mathematics abilities). Given the role of working memory and executive functioning in math achievement, this project explored the cognitive effects of bilingualism. It was hypothesized that participants who are bilingual, or who spoke a language other than English at home, would have enhanced performances on working memory and executive functioning tasks. It was further hypothesized that if an executive functioning bilingual advantage existed, then bilinguals would exhibit stronger math abilities. College students (N = 42, nBilingual = 14, nMonolingual = 28) and elementary schoolers (N = 31, nBilingual = 14, nMonolingual = 17) participated in the study. Participants completed the Corsi Block Task (assessed working memory), the Flanker Task (assessed executive functioning), and the Woodcock Johnson Task (assessed math). There was no indication of a bilingual advantage in regard to working memory, executive functioning, or math abilities among the college and elementary samples. No significant correlations between degree of bilingualism and performance on each task were found in the college and elementary samples. However, there were significant correlations denoted between performance on specific tasks (e.g., Corsi Task and Woodcock Johnson Task, Corsi Task and Flanker Task, and Woodcock Johnson and Flanker 5 Block Task) in the elementary sample. In the future, a second elementary sample from a monolingual school could be collected to better understand the effect of bilingualism on one’s cognition.