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Theory of Mind and Language Similarity in Bilingual Children
by Kaya Z. Stiffel
Faculty Advisor: Catharine H. Echols, PhD
Recent research suggests bilingual children outperform monolingual counterparts on Theory of Mind (ToM) and Executive Function (EF) tasks. This study focused on the impact of language similarity on these abilities. Bilingual children (N=7; ages 3-5) were categorized into Close (C; N= 2) and Distant (D; N= 3) language similarity groups based on their secondary language’s proximity to English. Additionally, a monolingual control group (N=2) was included. In this study, a total of 7 participants were asked to complete a flanker task aimed at assessing their inhibitory control (EF) using reaction time (RT) and error count. The task consisted of two conditions: congruent and non congruent. The congruent condition involved all stimuli going in the same direction, while the non congruent condition had the middle stimulus going in the opposite direction from the rest. Participants also completed a false belief task (FBT) to evaluate ToM skills on a pass/fail basis (N=4 Pass; N= 3 Fail). A 2-way ANOVA test examining language similarity by congruent and non-congruent conditions revealed that distant bilinguals tended to show faster reaction times and fewer errors than close bilinguals for both flanker conditions. Furthermore, both bilingual groups tended to perform better than the monolinguals in both flanker conditions. An analysis of the false belief task revealed that monolinguals tended to pass the false belief task at a higher rate than the bilingual groups. Distant bilinguals tended to pass the false belief task more frequently than close bilinguals. These results are consistent with previous research suggesting a bilingual advantage in executive function and may indicate that language similarity plays a role in this advantage. Though, no bilingual advantage was observed for the ToM task.