Bilingualism and Affective Control: Comparison of Emotional Working Memory Capacity in child girls, Monolingual and Bilingual

The purpose of this research was a comparison of emotional working memory capacity in monolingual (Persian) and bilingual (Armenian-Persian) girls aged 7 to 9 years and 11 months and 29 days.

The statistical population of the current study included elementary school girls aged 7 to 9 years and 11 months and 29 days in the second semester of the 1401-1402 school in Tehran. The statistical sample included 30 monolingual students (Persian) and 30 bilingual students (Armenian-Persian) who were selected among the first to third- grade students of public schools and the available sampling method. In this research, the information was processed by children's emotional working memory capacity test and number capacity test (reading forward and reverse digits). The data were analyzed by the Kolmogorov Smirnov, the Independent Samples test to compare two groups and logistic regression in IBM SPSS STATISTICS21 software.

The results showed that there is a significant difference between monolingual and bilingual children in the age groups between 7 years and 6 months and 8 years and 11 months and 29 days (p<0.05), but no significant difference was observed in the other age groups (p>0.05). Also, the aging (by one unit) reduces by about 80.5% in the difference between the scores of monolingual and bilingual people (p>0.01).

According to the obtained results, it can be concluded that bilingualism is more effective than monolingualism in the capacity of emotional working memory and cognitive-emotional functions of children, and it should be taken into account in educational and business planning.