The Bilingual Gap in Children's Language and Emotional Development

Deborah Cobb-Clark, Colm Harmon and Anita Staneva

No 11800, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In this paper we examine whether – conditional on other family inputs – bilingual children achieve different outcomes in language and emotional development. Our data come from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) which allows us to analyze children's language and emotional development in depth. We relax the usual assumption that the production function underpinning child development is not itself a function of the age of the child and estimate the bilingual gap in children's language and emotional development as a cumulative process that depends on current and past endowments of cognitive and non-cognitive capacity. We find that the language development of bilingual children is not significantly different to that of their monolingual peers; however, there is evidence of a positive effect of bilingualism on emotional development.

Keywords: production function; cognitive and non-cognitive skills; value-added model; cohort studies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 I20 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2018-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-neu
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Published - published in: IZA Journal of Labor Economics, 2021, 10 (1)

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Related works:
Working Paper: The Bilingual Gap in Children's Language and Emotional Development (2018)
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