I benefici cognitivi del bilinguismo: qual è il ruolo della memoria di lavoro?

The cognitive benefits of bilingualism: what role does working memory play? The idea that bilingualism may have positive cognitive effects has received a significant amount of attention in scientific literature as well as in the press. It is difficult, however, to specify exactly what those cognitive advantages are. There are studies that suggest that they involve only specific aspects of executive control. In this direction, a number of studies have focused on the possible roles of inhibition and “shifting”. Fewer studies, however, have focused on the involvement of working memory and how it can be infuenced by the experience of processing more than one language. The present contribution falls within this line of research. We present the preliminary results of a study that compared the relative performance on executive function tasks in a group of monolingual and bilingual children growing up in Southern Italy, with a special emphasis on the role of working memory.