The aim of this work was to analyse the relationship between executive functions (Miyake, Friedman, Emerson, Witzki, Howerter and Wager, 2000) and phonological awareness in monolingual and bilingual 6 year old children. The bilingual context seems to favour the awareness of subjects about the arbitrariness of language and the rules and conventions that govern its production at the phonological, lexical, syntactic and pragmatic levels (Pearson, Fernandez and Oiler, 1993; Siguan, 2001). In turn, phonological awareness, and metalinguistic processes in general, are under the control of the prefrontal lobe. The prefrontal lobe is responsible for the intentional activity, which requires the participation of some functions that are essential for both solving complex problems as for cognitive self-regulation, such as inhibitory control, working memory and cognitive flexibility (Bental and Tirosh, 20075). From our point of view, higher levels of executive functioning facilitates and enhances the ability to analyse language (top-down processes in both cases), while the bilingual context acts as context that induces the completion of these activities spontaneously, and also through the school curriculum. The bilingual context would not necessarily determine a higher level, but an earlier acquisition and, therefore, would act as a protective factor for reading learning.
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