Multilingual experience and executive functions among children and adolescents in a multilingual city

Children develop their language capacities and executive functions (EF) throughout their school-aged years. Research has shown that bilingual children show different patterns of EF performance when compared to their monolingual counterparts. However, it is less clear how variations in children's multilingual experiences associate with variation in EF performance. The current study examined the variability of multilingual experience across the contexts of home and school and how it relates to EF. Sixty-seven children and adolescents from a multilingual community completed EF tasks that assessed their attention and monitoring. Given the sociolinguistic landscape of a multilingual community, all participants reported having exposure to at least a second language, and their multilingual experience was examined on a continuum across different contexts. Age was positively associated with both attention and monitoring. In addition, the degree of dynamic multilingual experience contributed to performance on monitoring. Our study shows that in children and adolescents, multilingual experience across the contexts of home and school accounted for additional variation in EF beyond chronological age.