Os efeitos do bilinguismo no desenvolvimento da metalinguagem e de componentes das funções executivas de crianças

Abstract

From a psycholinguistic perspective, this cross-sectional study falls on an interface between child bilingualism and cognition. The main objective of this study is to verify whether there are differences in bilingual (Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish speakers) and monolingual students (Brazilian Portuguese speakers) as the components of executive functions and meta-language. In order to test the hypothesis that bilingualism impacts in the development of ex-ecutive functions components and metalanguage, twenty-three (23) bilingual and 23 monolin-gual children, forty-six (n = 46), equally distributed according to age and school year - from first (1st) to third (3rd) year of elementary school), were examined through verbal and non-verbal tasks of executive functions and tasks of metalanguage. Verbal tasks that assess com-ponents of executive functions were Child Hayling Test, the subtests of Children´s Test of Pseudowords and Children Digit Span Test. Non-verbal tasks were Five Digit Test, Bells Test, Corsi Block Test and Trail Making Test for Children. Language Arbitrariness Test and Symbol Substitution Test were applied to evaluate the metalanguage. Forty-two (42) measures were derived from the nine proposed tasks, among which eighteen (18) have presented statis-tically significant differences, fourteen (14) have showed bilingual and four (4) monolingual advantage. Through the Mann Whitney statistical test, it was observed that there were no dif-ferences in the comparison between groups as the metalanguage measures. In general, consid-ering the measures that evaluate the components of the executive functions, the bilingual group has overcome the monolingual group in most of the found differences. It was found that there are differences between bilinguals and monolinguals regarding timing for adaptation to changes (cognitive flexibility).