The effect of executive function on referential use in returnee children

Abstract

This longitudinal study investigates the choice of referential expressions in English of returnee children. The specific aim of this study is to examine whether there is a correlation between executive functions and choices of referential expressions in returnee children, and how they correlate if there is. Thirty-six Japanese-English speaking returnee bilingual children (returnee children are the group of children from immigrant families who returned to their first language dominant society from their second language dominant society after some time spent there) aged from 7 to 13 participated in a narrative task by telling a story of a wordless book “Frog on his own” (Mayer, 1973) in English and three executive tasks (DCCS, Simon task, and N-back task). There were three testing sessions, administered with a time interval of one year after the first session, and four years after the second one. Children with more advanced executive function skills are predicted to perform bettern the narrative task than other children, namely producing more appropriate referents to avoid ambiguity. Apart from that, crosslinguistic influence is expected during the second and(or) the third session of the narrative task, where the exposure to English decreased drastically while Japanese increased significantly. The results show that mixing cost and L2 exposure affect returnee children’s referential use. That is, children who have smaller mixing costs and sustained English exposure show better referential skills in maintenance by using more pronouns and fewer nominals.