Cognitive flexibility in drawings of bilingual children

A. Karmiloff-Smith's (1990) task of drawing a nonexistent object is considered to be a measure of cognitive flexibility. The notion of earlier emergence of cognitive flexibility in bilingual children motivated the current researchers to request 4- and 5-year-old English-Hebrew and Arabic-Hebrew bilingual children and their monolingual peers to draw a flower and a house that do not exist (N=80). Bilinguals exhibited a significantly higher rate of interrepresentational flexibility in their drawings (e.g., "a giraffe flower,""a chair-house," found in 28 of 54 drawings), whereas the level of complex intrarepresentational change was similar across groups. Interrepresentational drawings were previously reported only for children older than 7 years. The specific mechanisms by which bilinguals' language experience may lead to interrepresentational flexibility are discussed.