Inhibitory Control or Social Skills ? Two Accounts for a Bilingual Advantage

Children who can speak more than one language show advantages in Executive Functions(EFs) and perspective-taking (e.g. Fan et al., 2015) as compared to monolinguals. Bilinguals’superior perspective-taking abilities have been explained by enhanced inhibitory control(Goetz, 2003; Kovács, 2009). However, enhanced perspective-taking in bilinguals is arguedto be social, not the result of an inhibitory control advantage (e.g. Fan et al., 2015; Libermanet al., 2017). To address this debate, we explored the inhibitory control and the social accountby asking 40 monolingual and 42 multilingual 4-to-7-year-old children to complete twoconditions: a social (i.e. Director) and non-social (i.e. Camera) versions of a referentialperspective-taking task. In addition, we tested children in three different measures ofinhibitory control and in a test of emotion understanding with low demands on EFs, the Testof Emotion Comprehension (TEC; Pons et al., 2004). Multilingual children outperformedmonolingual children in both the Director and the Camera condition of the communicationexperiment. All children, both monolinguals and multilinguals, achieved overall higherscores in the social condition than they did in the non-social variant. Multilinguals alsodemonstrated superior inhibitory control in the inhibition tasks. No difference was recordedbetween multilinguals and monolinguals in the TEC. Although inhibitory control andemotion understanding were positively related with performances in the communicationtasks, neither inhibition nor emotion comprehension accounted for multilinguals’ superiorityin the Director or the Camera tasks. We speculated that a third factor, metalinguisticawareness, might be crucial for multilinguals’ superiority in referential perspective-taking.