PRESCHOOL EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONING IN MONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL CHILDREN: ASSESSMENT THROUGHOUT SYSTEMATIC OBSERVATION

The objective of the present study was to determine whether there were differences in the executive functioning of the monolingual (Spanish speakers) and bilingual (Spanish and English speakers) children of 3rd school year of Preschool Education (5 years old). For this purpose, 10 students were studied. Five of them were exposed at their school to the Integral Program of Bilingualism in foreign languages. The remaining five students were not. Executive functioning was assessed individually using systematic observation. We used three ludic activities that require the implementation of executive components of inhibition, working memory and cognitive flexibility. The results indicate that the bilingual participants perform significantly better than the monolingual participants the three ludic activities that assess the executive components. It is therefore concluded that these bilingual students have a superior executive performance than these monolingual students. Although these results point in the same direction of previous studies existing in the literature so that Bilingualism seems to affect positively executive functions, more studies like this but with a larger sample size are required.