Effects of early bilingualism on learning phonological regularities in a new language Li-Jen Kuo a,⇑ , Richard C. Anderson b a Department of Educational Psychology, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115, USA b Center for the Study of Reading, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, USA article info Article history: Received 21 March 2011 Revised 8 August 2011 Available online 12 December 2011 Keywords: Bilingualism Language Phonotactics Acquisition Mandarin Statistical learning abstract Drawing on structural sensitivity theory, the current study investi- gated monolingual and bilingual children’s ability to learn how phonemes combine to form acceptable syllables in a new language. A total of 186 monolingual and bilingual kindergarteners, first graders, and second graders in Taiwan participated in the study. Bilingual children, regardless of whether they actively used a sec- ond language at home or simply had exposure to it, showed an advantage over their monolingual peers in learning the phonolog- ical patterns in the new language. The study provides empirical support for structural sensitivity theory and calls for the need to reconceptualize the effects of early bilingualism. Ó 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction A growing body of research has demonstrated that bilingualism may have an impact on aspects of children’s cognitive development. Bilingual children have been found to outperform their monolingual peers on cognitive tasks that contain conflicting or misleading cues such as the Simon task (Martin- Rhee & Bialystok, 2008), the ambiguous figure reversal task (Bialystok & Shapero, 2005), false belief reasoning (Kovacs, 2009), and the dimensional change card sort task (Bialystok, 1999; Bialystok & Martin, 2004). These tasks all require children to control their attention and inhibit interfering op- tions—a process that parallels bilinguals’ unique experience of choosing between two competing lan- guage systems, selecting the structures of the target language, and inhibiting interference from the nontarget language (Bialystok, 2009). It has been argued that this unique cognitive demand facilitates bilingual children’s development of executive control, which includes the following primary 0022-0965/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2011.08.013 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: lijenkuo@niu.edu (L.-J. Kuo). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 111 (2012) 455–467 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Journal of Experimental Child Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp