Bilingualism Enriches the Poor: Enhanced Cognitive Control in Low-Income Minority Children

This study explores whether the cognitive advantage associated with bilingualism in executive functioning extends to young children challenged by poverty and if so, which specific processes are most affected. Forty Portuguese-Luxembourgish bilingual children from low-income immigrant families in Luxembourg and 40 matched monolingual children from Portugal completed visuo-spatial tests of working memory, abstract reasoning, selective attention, and interference suppression. Two broad cognitive factors of executive functioning labeled representation (abstract reasoning and working memory) and control (selective attention and interference suppression) emerged from principal components analysis. Whereas there were no group differences in representation, the bilinguals performed significantly better than the monolinguals in control. These results demonstrate first, that the bilingual advantage is neither confounded with nor limited by socioeconomic and cultural factors and second, that separable aspects of executive functioning are differentially affected by bilingualism. The bilingual advantage lies in control but not in visuo-spatial representational processes.