Monolingual and bilingual children's performance on arithmetic fluency varies by language fluency.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Development
• Psycholinguistics
• Educational Psychology

Background:

• Bilingualism significantly influences cognitive development in children.
• Previous research primarily used laboratory settings, limiting understanding of bilingualism's effect on naturalistic cognitive skills like arithmetic fluency.
• The impact of varying degrees of bilingualism on the relationship between language and arithmetic skills remains understudied.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how bilingualism affects arithmetic fluency in school-aged children.
• To explore the relationship between arithmetic fluency and language fluency (degree of bilingualism) in children.
• To determine if individual differences in language proficiency among bilingual children influence arithmetic skills.

Main Methods:

• Compared arithmetic fluency performance between monolingual and bilingual children in third to fifth grades.
• Assessed 70 monolingual and 51 bilingual children.
• Analyzed the correlation between children's arithmetic fluency and their language fluency.

Main Results:

• No significant difference was found in arithmetic fluency between monolingual and bilingual children.
• Individual differences revealed a positive association between arithmetic fluency and skill in the nondominant language among bilingual children.
• Language proficiency in the nondominant language emerged as a key factor.

Conclusions:

• Bilingualism itself does not inherently alter arithmetic fluency compared to monolingualism.
• Individual language fluency, particularly in the nondominant language, plays a crucial role in the cognitive profile of bilingual children.
• Future research should focus on individual language proficiency to fully understand bilingualism's cognitive effects.