Language experience of multilinguals and its relation to executive functioning

Abstract

Background: South Africa finds itself at the heart of an ever escalating global trend towards increased multilingualism. Along with this realisation has come an ever growing investigation of the impact of bi/multilingualism on our cognitive abilities; both positively and negatively. Aim: This rationale gets explored here in order to investigate whether multilingualism influences the executive functioning ability of South African youth. Method: This was facilitated through the current study aiming to investigate the relationship between the self reported language experience of 30 young adults and their performance on executive function tasks. The four executive functions that were targeted were planning, inhibition, cognitive flexibility and fluency. Results and Conclusion: Taking the unique South African milieu into consideration results indicated that for the characteristics investigated here cognitive flexibility did not show a significant relationship with language experience. In turn planning and inhibition only produced a moderate degree of significance for their relationships with language experience. Finally fluency showed to have a significant relationship to the language experience of these individuals. The South African reality and history was then engaged with in a discussion around these results. The conclusion was then drawn that the South African population in this sample did not perform to the preconceived internationally recorded influence of the multilingual advantage.