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No, bilingual children have no general advantage in their intelligence development.

Some research teams have found and continue to find advantages of bilingual children in the so-called executive functions (1,2). Executive functions describe the mental processes we need to plan, organise our actions, and focus our attention on what is relevant. They are at work when we solve the tasks of an intelligence test. However, numerous studies do not find a difference between monolingual and bilingual children's executive functions or even show the opposite (3,4).

Would you like to support further research into bilingual development?
In the project multilingualism and communication, we explore the developmental processes of children who grow up in multilingual environments. We are always looking for bilingual children between the ages of 3 months and 14 years who would like to take part in our studies.

You can register with us using this contact form. Your information will be treated confidentially. Once we conduct a study with your child’s age group, we will contact you and ask whether and when you have time to pay us a visit. We will then arrange an appointment for you to come and see us at the university.
You can change your mind about participating at any time. Simply give us a call on 044 635 74 81 or emailMarco Bleiker.

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Your child

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Swiss German

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studies at the Department of Psychology in Oerlikon and online studies

only online studies (i.e. on language acquisition)

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More information on the research topic Multilingualism and Communication can be found here.

References

Bialystok, E., Barac, R., Blaye, A., & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2010). Word Mapping and Executive Functioning in Young Monolingual and Bilingual Children. Journal of Cognition and Development, 11(4), 485–508. https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2010.516420
Carlson, S. M., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2008). Bilingual experience and executive functioning in young children. Developmental Science, 11(2), 282–298. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00675.x
Goldsmith, S. F., El-Baba, M., He, X., Lewis, D. J., Akoury Dirani, L., Liu, J., & Morton, J. B. (2023). No bilingual advantage in children’s attentional disengagement: Congruency and sequential congruency effects in a large sample of monolingual and bilingual children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 233, 105692. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2023.105692
Paap, K. R., Johnson, H. A., & Sawi, O. (2015). Bilingual advantages in executive functioning either do not exist or are restricted to very specific and undetermined circumstances. Cortex, 69, 265–278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2015.04.014

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