The impact of bilingualism on working memory in pediatric epilepsy

- Bilingualism can enhance executive functioning; this is a skill negatively impacted across epilepsy syndromes.
- Bilingual children with epilepsy performed significantly better on working memory tasks than monolingual children.
- Other executive skills found to be stronger for typical bilingual children were not in our epilepsy sample.

Impairments in executive skills broadly span across multiple childhood epilepsy syndromes and can adversely affect quality of life. Bilingualism has been previously shown to correlate with enhanced executive functioning in healthy individuals. This study sought to determine whether the bilingual advantage in executive functioning exists in the context of pediatric epilepsy. We retrospectively analyzed neuropsychological data in 52 children with epilepsy and compared executive function scores in monolingual versus bilingual children with epilepsy while controlling for socioeconomic status and ethnicity. Bilingual children performed significantly better on the Working Memory Index than did monolingual children. There were no significant differences on the remaining executive function variables. The bilingual advantage appears to persist for working memory in children with epilepsy. These findings suggest that bilingualism is potentially a protective variable in the face of epilepsy-related working memory dysfunction.