TITLE:
A Review on the Relationship between Bilingualism and Working Memory
AUTHORS:
Qinyu Liu, Zhujun Liu
KEYWORDS:
Bilingualism, Bilingual Advantage, Working Memory, Systematic Review
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.11 No.2,
March
24,
2021
ABSTRACT: In the research on individuals’ linguistic development, bilingualism has received much attention, because bilingual’s cognitive ability is believed to differ from monolingual’s. With particular interest on how bilingualism would impact working memory, the authors reviewed the pertinent studies published in the journal of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition in recent three years (2017-2019). 7 out 49 studies were screened out for comparing and analyzed for their research design and results. By carefully reviewing these studies, the authors find bilingualism generally facilitates working memory capacity, especially for the visuospatial component. However, the bilingual advantage in verbalcomponent is still under somewhat debate, and needs further research.