Context: Bilingualism and Working Memory

Recently, a cognitive psychologist wanted to investigate whether growing up bilingual affects working memory capacity in adulthood.

She recruited two groups of participants:

• Group A: Adults who were raised in bilingual households, learning both English and Mandarin simultaneously from birth.
• Group B: Adults who were raised in monolingual households, learning only English from birth.

The researcher tested both groups using a backward digit-span task to measure their working memory capacity. She found that Group A had a significantly higher average digit-span score than Group B.

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The investigation outlined above is a quasi-experiment.