LINGUISTIC STIMULATION IMPACT ON VERBAL WORKING MEMORY IN THE EARLY STAGES OF SCHOOL EDUCATION

Background: When studying cognitive flexibility in young children in bilingual programmes, a positive correlation has been noted between working memory efficiency and bilingualism. Research results point to the advantage in early vs. late or more proficient vs. less proficient bilinguals. The goal of this exploratory research was to investigate the importance of intensive language stimulation for the development of phonological short-term and working memory in children at the beginning of their school education. Material/Methods: The research was conducted in Northern Poland among 77 children attending two elementary schools: 42 children attended a Polish- language school (monolingual school group), and 35 children attended a school in which English was the language of instruction (bilingual school group). The children were tested twice: at the beginning and at the end of the first grade. Four tasks were administered: digit span, non-word repetition, phoneme discrimination and phoneme isolation. Results: The analysis of longitudinal level changes showed a progressive development of the analyzed skills, irrespective of the school the children attended. However, different change dynamics in children attending the mono-or bilingual school have been observed. The progressive performance improvement in Zetotest, phoneme discrimination and phoneme isolation tasks was substantially higher in the bilingual school group when compared to the monolingual one. However, we reported no differences in the digit repetition skill between the groups. Moreover, the sex of a child appeared to be a strong determinant of verbal working memory development. In both stages girls performed better than boys. Conclusions: Considerable advantage in phonological working memory processing has been reported after a year of bilingual education as compared to education within a monolingual context.