Dr. Inés de la Viña

Abstract

Research on educational bilingualism has traditionally focused on linguistic outcomes, particularly vocabulary development, or on broader cognitive effects of bilingual experience (e.g., Bialystok & Barac, 2012; Nicolay & Poncelet, 2015; Simonis et al., 2020). Less is known about how sustained L2 exposure in school contexts relates simultaneously to the development of attentional skills and Theory of Mind (ToM) over time.

This presentation reports findings from the first wave of a four-year longitudinal project examining the impact of school-based L2 exposure on cognitive and social-cognitive development in children from monolingual Spanish backgrounds. We present data from 231 Spanish children (126 girls; MeanAge=6.31) attending schools with L2-English exposure ranging between 13 and 83% of the curriculum. Children were tested at the beginning and end of Year 1 of Primary Education. Attentional skills were assessed using 5 tasks from the TEA-Ch (Manly et al., 2016), indexing selective attention, switching, and response inhibition. ToM was measured using a multidimensional task (Sotomayor-Enríquez et al., 2023), capturing cognitive, affective, and conative components. Vocabulary (L1 and L2) was treated as an individual-difference predictor alongside working memory, non-verbal reasoning, and demographic factors (e.g., age, gender).

Generalised Linear Mixed Models, accounting for factors such as socioeconomic status, onset of L2 exposure and language exposure outside of school, indicated that children’s cognitive skills benefit from (high) L2 exposure at school, with greater L2 exposure being linked to more enhanced attentional/executive skills as well as to a larger L2 vocabulary. L2 exposure at school also predicted ToM development, but its effects varied across components: associations were strongest for cognitively demanding concepts (e.g., moral reasoning) than for affective or conative ones (e.g., emotion). 

These findings provide new longitudinal evidence that sustained school-based L2 exposure relates to both executive attention and specific aspects of social-cognitive development. We discuss implications for bilingual education and the cognitive and social benefits of school-based L2 exposure.

References

Bialystok, E., & Barac, R. (2012). Emerging bilingualism: Dissociating advantages for metalinguistic awareness and executive control. Cognition, 122(1), 67–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2011.08.003.

Manly, T., Robertson, I. H., Galloway, M., & Hawkins, K. (2016). Test of everyday attention for children (TEA-Ch). Pearson Assessment.

Nicolay, A.-C., & Poncelet, M. (2015). Cognitive benefits in children enrolled in an early bilingual immersion school: A follow-up study. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18(4), 789–795. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728914000868 

Simonis, M., Van der Linden, L., Galand, B., Hiligsmann, P., & Szmalec, A. (2020). Executive control performance and foreign-language proficiency associated with immersion education in French-speaking Belgium. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 23(2), 355–370. https://doi.org/10.1017/S136672891900021X. 

Sotomayor-Enríquez, K., Gweon, H., Saxe, R., & Richardson, H. (2023). Open dataset of theory of mind reasoning in early to middle childhood. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/gczp9 

Biography

Dr. Inés de la Viña is a Teaching Associate in Applied Linguistics in the School of English, University of Nottingham. She is currently examining the cognitive and psychosocial effects of second language learning in later life. This work focuses on healthy ageing and explores whether engaging in L2 learning can serve as a form of cognitive training to enhance executive function, semantic processing, and overall well-being in older adults. This emerging direction integrates her long-standing interest in language learning, cognitive development, and socially impactful research.

In parallel, she is involved in a project led by Dr Beatriz González-Fernández (University of Sheffield) investigating the learning, acquisition, and processing of polysemy and homonymy. This study examines second language learners' knowledge and perceptions of multiple meanings of English words, with particular emphasis on how semantic and etymological relatedness (polysemy vs. homonymy) influences meaning acquisition.