Resumen de The role of educational setting in the development of verbal aspect and executive functions: evidence from Greek-German bilingual children

Ifigeneia Dosi, Despina Papadopoulou

• The present study aims at exploring: (a) the role of the educational setting in the acquisition of aspect and executive functions (i.e. updating) skills, (b) the acquisition of the aspectual features in Greek-German bilingual children and (c) the impact of updating on the acquisition of aspect. Imperfective aspect has been found to be acquired later than perfective in previous studies. Moreover, a bilingual educational setting seems to enhance not only cognitive but also linguistic abilities. The participants of the present study are Greek-German bilingual children, who attend a bilingual or a Greek dominant educational setting. They were tested in two baseline tasks, two linguistic tasks and an executive function, updating, task. The findings reveal that bilinguals who attend a monolingual educational setting performed similarly to the monolingual control group on aspect, whereas bilinguals who attend a bilingual educational setting scored lower than the monolinguals. In the updating task, the students of the bilingual educational setting scored higher than the other groups. Overall, our findings suggest that the bilingual educational setting seems to boost executive function (updating) skills, while the acquisition of aspect is affected by vocabulary knowledge.