We intend to outline and characterize factors which might explain inconsistencies between studies claiming that bilingualism has neurocognitive benefits and those that failed to find such evidence. In this review, we discuss studies that have examined the effect of life-long bilingualism on age-related cognitive and neural decline, with a focus on discrepancies between different sources of evidence. Research has suggested that using two or more languages on a daily basis helps older adults maintain a heightened functional state and improves neurocomputational efficiency. That is, the massive practice in visuo/spatial processing and memory seemed to provide an advantage in the communication between systems of the mind causing increased general cognitive fluidity, expressed in higher intellectual performance among the Chinese. There were differences between the two ethnicities in the strength of relations between constructs, attributed to Chinese logographic experience. Structural equation modeling showed that performance is organized in four systems (i.e., domain-specific problem solving, representational capacity, inference, and consciousness) integrated by g, in both ethnic groups. Chinese outperformed Greeks in (1) reading-related processing efficiency tasks but not in common objects (2) spatial but not verbal WM, (3) cognitive, and (4) the self-awareness tasks. Speeded performance was examined with commonly familiar objects and tasks related to reading (i.e., Latin, Arabic, and Chinese characters). They were examined on speeded performance, working memory, reasoning, and self-awareness tasks in order to investigate possible effects of learning the Chinese logographic system on possible differences in intellectual development between these ethnic groups. This study investigated intellectual development in 4–7 years old Greek and Chinese children. Taken together, these findings challenge the existing theoretical accounts of the RAN–arithmetic fluency relationship and suggest that, similar to reading fluency, multiple processes underlie the RAN–arithmetic fluency relationship. In addition, RAN continued to predict addition and subtraction fluency even after controlling for all other processing skills. The results indicated first that RAN was a significant correlate of arithmetic fluency and the correlations did not vary as a function of type of RAN or arithmetic fluency tasks. A total of 160 third-year kindergarten Chinese children (83 boys and 77 girls, mean age = 5.11 years) were assessed on RAN (colors, objects, digits, and dice), nonverbal IQ, visual–verbal paired associate learning, phonological awareness, short-term memory, speed of processing, approximate number system acuity, and arithmetic fluency (addition and subtraction). Thus, the purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to examine how RAN (numeric and non-numeric) predicts a subdomain of mathematics (arithmetic fluency) and (b) to examine what processing skills may account for the RAN–arithmetic fluency relationship. However, the nature of their relationship remains unclear. Rapid automatized naming (RAN) has been found to predict mathematics. Altogether, results indicated that children understand yesterday better than tomorrow due to the increased cognitive demands involved in reasoning about future events. Across sentence types, forward temporal reasoning was easier for children than backward temporal reasoning. In Experiment 4, 3- to 5-year-olds completed tasks requiring either forward or backward temporal reasoning about sentences referring to before, after, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Children tended to select pictures depicting the outcome of actions regardless of tense or temporal adverb, whereas adults’ judgments were based on temporal adverbs. In the next two experiments, 4- and 5-year-olds (Experiment 2) and adults (Experiment 3) completed the same task but with sentences containing conflicting temporal information (“I carved the pumpkin tomorrow”). Children performed better with past tense sentences than with future tense sentences, and including tomorrow in future tense sentences increased accuracy. In Experiment 1, 3- to 5-year-olds viewed two pictures of an object with a visible change of state (e.g., a carved pumpkin and an intact pumpkin) while listening to sentences referring to past or future actions (“I carved the pumpkin yesterday” or “I’m gonna carve the pumpkin tomorrow”) and selected the matching picture. A picture–sentence matching task was used to investigate children’s understanding of yesterday and tomorrow.
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