Martin Jakobus Koch

This study, we examine the possible advantages of early bilingual education and the impact of family SES for the cognitive development of children. Participants (N = 39) were students at regular (German) or immersion (German-English) primary schools in Germany. Repeated measures ANOVAs and regression analyzes revealed that the participants from the immersion school outperformed their peers from the regular schools on all L2 (English) proficiency and cognitive variables on the posttest. Furthermore, SES is significantly more influential in participants who follow regular school programs than in those who are enrolled in immersion schools.

The cognitive advantage (CA) hypothesis claims that multilingualism promotes the development of several basic cognitive capacities. Recently there have also been numerous contradictory findings and methodological objections. We extend the investigation of a possible CA to broader cognitive competencies such as cognitive flexibility. A promising candidate for this is ‘flexibility of goal adjustment’ (FGA), a capacity of developmental regulation that solves problems through flexible adaptation processes. In a study with N = 119 monolingual and multilingual adults we found a positive correlation between multilingualism and FGA. However, the mediator function of executive capacities entailed in the CA hypothesis could not be demonstrated.