Two groups of 8-year-old children who were monolingual or bilingual completed a complex classification task in which they made semantic judgments on stimuli that were presented either visually or auditorally. The task requires coordinating a variety of executive control components, specifically, working memory, inhibition, and shifting. When each of the visual and auditory tasks was presented alone, performance was comparable for children in the two groups. Combining the two modalities into a dual-task paradigm made the task more difficult, and on this combined task, bilingual children maintained better accuracy than monolingual children, especially on the visual task. The results are interpreted in terms of the enhanced ability of bilingual children to coordinate the executive control components required in performing this complex task.
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