BILINGUISMO E MEMÓRIA DE TRABALHO EM CRIANÇAS EM IDADE ESCOLAR: UMA REVISÃO INTEGRATIVA DA LITERATURA BILINGUALISM AND WORKING MEMORY IN SCHOOL-AGED CHILDREN: AN INTEGRATIVE LITERATURE REVIEW

Abstract

Studies that investigate the influence of a bilingual experience on executive functions have found contrasting results. More specifically, researchers are far from reaching a consensus on the relationship between bilingualism and working memory in children. With this review, we aimed to investigate the impact of a bilingual experience on working memory in bilingual school aged children. For this purpose, we searched for articles in the PUBMED / MEDLINE, BVS - LILACS and SCIELO databases, published between 2009 and 2019. A total of 21 articles were selected according to the inclusion criteria. According to the analysis carried out, the inconsistency of the results was confirmed: 13 studies revealed evidence of some kind of advantage of bilingual children compared to monolingual children, 6 did not find a significant impact of a bilingual experience on children's performance in tasks of working memory and only 2 found some kind of evidence of the advantage of monolingual children over bilingual children. In order to make sense of these results, a discussion was made about factors that are of fundamental importance in bilingualism research, as they are directly linked to the bilingual experience and interact with it: the time and intensity of exposure to languages, the age and proficiency of the children. Differences in these aspects may justify some of the inconsistencies found. In order for a better understanding of the influence of bilingualism on executive functions be reached, some suggestions for future research are to carry out longitudinal studies as well as to assess the role of different bilingual education contexts.