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.
Adi-Japha
Esther
E
School of Education, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. japhae@mail.biu.ac.il
Berberich-Artzi
Jennie
J
Libnawi
Afaf
A
D001154:Art; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009048:Motor Skills; D019303:Multilingualism