The Development of Cognitive Regulation in Connection with the Communicative Competence of Monolingual and Balanced Bilingual Children

Preschool age is the most favorable period for mastering languages due to a number of psychological factors. This is the age of potential children's opportunities, the period of intensive development of language abilities. Therefore, an indispensable pedagogical condition for the development of early bilingualism is the creation of a favorable educational environment for children. The aim of the study is to study the development of cognitive regulation in connection with the communicative competence of balanced bilinguals (Tatar / Russian) and monolinguals (Russian), whose socialization is carried out in different developing subject-spatial environments. The research methodology is based on sociocultural concepts of “environmental” influences on the mental development (Vygotsky, 1999; Bronfenbrenner, 1999). The empirical study involved 60 children aged 5 to 7 years, among them 30 balanced bilinguals socializing in a bilingual (Tatar/Russian) environment, and 30 monolinguals in a Russian-speaking linguistic environment. To diagnose the development of children’s cognitive regulation, children’s subtests of the NEPSY-II neuropsychological battery were used: “Repetition of sentences”, “Memory for construction”, “Inhibition”, “Sorting cards according to a changeable attribute”; communicative competence in communication - the methods of “Pictures” by E.O. Smirnova and E.A. Kalyagina, “Peculiarities of interpersonal relations for children” by G.R. Khuzeeva; level of general intelligence - a children’s version of the Raven Test methodology. Statistical processing of the obtained data was carried out using the non-parametric U-Mann-Whitney test, Spearman correlation analysis. Conclusions and recommendations. It has been established that balanced bilinguals in older preschool age, compared with monolinguals, have advantages in cognitive regulation, in particular, in updating non-verbal information in the linguistic context of the target language (visual working memory), blocking and suppressing irrelevant verbal and non-verbal information (inhibitory control). Bilingual preschoolers are more active in communication, but less prone to leadership and dominance in a peer group, while monolingual children readily take on a leading role in a group with a desire for a high social position in a peer group. Differences in the convergence of indicators in groups of preschoolers were revealed, in particular, in the group of monolingual children, indicators of cognitive regulation are significantly associated with indicators of communicative competence, while in the group of balanced bilinguals they are with indicators of general intelligence as the ability to use mental operations in solving cognitive problems. We assume that the content of the educational program for the older group of monolinguals in the preschool educational institution is focused primarily on social and communicative development, while for bilinguals it is focused on cognitive and speech development.