Premature-birth is defined by the World Health Organization as birth less than 37 weeks. These children are particularly susceptible deficiencies in executive functioning (EF) as compared to term-born children. It has yet to be explored whether bilingualism might also give an edge to preterm-born-children (PBC) in EF. The present study aims to fill this gap by examining the EF of bilingual versus monolingual preterm-born children in Miami-Dade County. All 16 children were right-handed, ages 6-7, and born before 35 weeks. Results showed that both groups performed about the same on the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) and Go/No Go (GNG) task in terms of accuracy, however, the bilingual-PBC were over two times as fast in response as the monolingual group in the Go-trial suggesting faster information processing ability. Preliminary fNIRS analysis did not reveal a statistically significant difference in the brain activity over a broad area of the frontal lobe
