ABSTRACT
Purpose
To assess whether bilingualism, on a language switching experiment, is associated with higher or lower accuracy and speed of the rapid automatized naming of objects and investigate the influence of language switching on reading speed.
Methods
The performance of 50 Brazilian bilingual children in the Rapid Automatized Naming Task, whose L1 was Brazilian Portuguese and who were exposed to English daily at school, was assessed. Forty-seven monolingual (Brazilian Portuguese) children were grouped according to age.
Results
Language switching interfered with the performance of the bilingual children in the Rapid Automatized Naming Task in terms of speed and accuracy. No correlations were found between the performance in the RAN task and Reading Speed.
Conclusion
Brazilian bilingual students showed poor performance in the rapid naming task on the switch trial when compared to monolingual students, showing higher rates of mistakes, especially hesitations. Only the performance of bilingual students in the rapid naming task in L2 correlated with L1 reading speed.
Keywords:
Bilingualism; Multilingualism; Mental Processes; Cognition; Reading