Just out: we found that bilingual preterm-born children performed significantly better that their monolingual peers on an EF task. Surprisingly, 100% of bilingual group’s parents told us they had been advised to stop using Spanish at home. @ADarcyMahoney https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1bWVc_K88pdmK5

All children were born before 35 weeks’ gestation and were categorized as monolingual or bilingual and then matched on neonatal acuity @ADarcyMahoney

We operationalized bilingualism as productive capacity in both Spanish and English and confirmed this by four triangulated measures

The bilingual preterm-born children performed significantly better than the monolingual preterm-born children on the Flanker task. The bilingual group was also faster and more accurate on the Simon task, however group differences were not significant.

All of the Hispanic parents had been advised to not continue speaking Spanish at home. It may be the case that the pediatric clinicians, teachers, and SLPs who recommended this believed they were helping these families, given the risks associated with prematurity. @ADarcyMahoney

We do not know how the families in our study continued supporting their child’s bilingualism, as this was not the goal of the study. However, all of the Hispanic parents reported needing more support in raising their children bilingually. @ADarcyMahoney

Supporting bilingualism could be a way to improve EF outcomes in preterm-born children. Our preliminary data provide initial support for this but we need more research to confirm if these results hold for other populations. @ADarcyMahoney