Attentional processes in low-socioeconomic status bilingual children: are they modulated by the amount of bilingual experience?

Linguistic, affective, parental, and educational contributions to the bicultural identity development of Balkan minority adolescents

This study investigated linguistic, affective, parental, and educational contributions to bicultural identity, in two samples of younger (13- to 14-year-old; N = 95) and older (16- to 17-year-old; N = 67) bilingual adolescents, who were immigrants or belonged to ethnic minority communities in the Balkans. While bicultural identity level was not differentiated as a function of age group, there was an age-related shift in its predictors. Bicultural identity level was significantly predicted by perceived educators' attitudes toward linguistic/cultural diversity in the younger adolescent group, but by personal affective states (motivation and attitudes) toward the mainstream language in the older adolescent group. Implications of the findings are discussed regarding educational and family practices that would facilitate biculturalism in minority adolescents.

Study of Alerting, Orienting, and Executive Control Attentional Networks in Bilingual and Monolingual Primary School Children: The Role of Socioeconomic Status

For decades, researchers have suggested the existence of a bilingual cognitive advantage, especially in tasks involving executive functions such as inhibition, shifting, and updating. Recently, an increasing number of studies have questioned whether bilingualism results in a change in executive functions, highlighting conflicting data published in the literature. The present study compared the performance of third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade bilingual and monolingual children on attentional and cognitive tasks. The participants were 61 monolingual and 74 bilingual children (M = 114.6 months; SD = 8.48 months) who were tested on two versions of the attention network task (ANT), with and without social stimuli, as well as tests investigating working memory, short-term memory, narrative memory, and receptive vocabulary. Data on families' socioeconomic status and children's reasoning abilities were also collected. The results showed that bilingualism and socioeconomic status affected attentional networks in tasks involving social stimuli. In tasks involving non-social stimuli, socioeconomic status only affected the alerting and executive conflict networks. Consistent with the literature, a positive relationship emerged between socioeconomic status and executive control in the context of social stimuli, and a negative relationship emerged between socioeconomic status and the alerting network in the context of non-social stimuli. Interestingly, neither socioeconomic status nor social attentional networks correlated with working memory. Therefore, although more investigations are required, the results suggest that differences in social contexts mainly affect attentional functions.

Prospective Memory, Sustained Attention and Response Inhibition in Poly-Substance Users Stable on Methadone Maintenance Treatment

Background: Prospective memory and response inhibition are interrelated constructs, though studied separately in the drug addiction literature. Also, although sustained attention underlies response inhibition, its role in the relation between these functions has been largely neglected. The limited research on the cognitive effects of methadone-maintenance treatment (MMT) further stresses the importance of investigating these effects. Objective: Therefore, the current study focused on possible effects of MMT combined with long-term drug abuse on all these functions. Thirty five long term opiate/poly-substance users in MMT and thirty four drug-free controls were screened for socioeconomic status, anxiety, depression and general, non-verbal intelligence and then tested on a self-report measure of prospective memory and on the Go/No-Go task. Results: Compared to controls, the MMT group scored worse in all functions assessed. Prospective memory scores were also negatively related to Go/NoGo accuracy scores. Conclusion: As predicted, (a) the MMT participants show impairments in prospective memory, sustained attention and response inhibition and (b) prospective memory, response inhibition and sustained attention are related constructs. The results of this study could inform current rehabilitation and relapse prevention cognitive training practices.

Majority language skill, not measures of bilingualism, predicts executive attention in bilingual children

Evidence is mixed regarding whether and why bilingual children might be advantaged in the development of executive functions. Five preregistered hypotheses regarding sources of a bilingual advantage were tested with data from 102 Spanish-English bilingual children and 25 English monolingual children who were administered a test of executive attention, the flanker task, at 7, 8, and 9 years of age. Measures of the children's early and concurrent bilingual exposure and their concurrent English and Spanish skill were available from a larger longitudinal study in which these children participated. Tests of the preregistered hypotheses yielded null findings: The bilingual children's executive attention abilities were unrelated to their amount of early exposure to mixed input, to balance in their early dual language exposure, to balance in their concurrent exposure, to their degree of bilingualism, or to their combined Spanish + English vocabulary score. English vocabulary score was a positive significant correlate of executive attention among the bilingual children, but those bilingual children above the group median in English vocabulary did not outperform the monolingual children when the comparison was adjusted for nonverbal IQ. These findings suggest that a language learning ability may explain the association between bilingualism and executive function. Because the best statistical approach to testing for effects on differences is a matter of dispute, all analyses were conducted with both a difference score and a residual gain score as the outcome variable. The central findings, but not all findings, were the same with both approaches.

Predicting multilingual effects on executive function and individual connectomes in children: An ABCD study

While there is a substantial amount of work studying multilingualism's effect on cognitive functions, little is known about how the multilingual experience modulates the brain as a whole. In this study, we analyzed data of over 1,000 children from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study to examine whether monolinguals and multilinguals differ in executive function, functional brain connectivity, and brain-behavior associations. We observed significantly better performance from multilingual children than monolinguals in working-memory tasks. In one finding, we were able to classify multilinguals from monolinguals using only their whole-brain functional connectome at rest and during an emotional n-back task. Compared to monolinguals, the multilingual group had different functional connectivity mainly in the occipital lobe and subcortical areas during the emotional n-back task and in the occipital lobe and prefrontal cortex at rest. In contrast, we did not find any differences in behavioral performance and functional connectivity when performing a stop-signal task. As a second finding, we investigated the degree to which behavior is reflected in the brain by implementing a connectome-based behavior prediction approach. The multilingual group showed a significant correlation between observed and connectome-predicted individual working-memory performance scores, while the monolingual group did not show any correlations. Overall, our observations suggest that multilingualism enhances executive function and reliably modulates the corresponding brain functional connectome, distinguishing multilinguals from monolinguals even at the developmental stage.

Measures of Bilingual Cognition - From Infancy to Adolescence

An extensive literature exists regarding the effect of bilingualism on cognition in developing populations. However, the term 'cognition' is vague and applies to a large number of different abilities. We reviewed 60 publications examining cognition in simultaneous bilingual children to understand what aspects of cognition have been studied in this population and what tasks have been used, in addition to qualitatively assessing the results of bilingual/monolingual comparisons. Executive function was the most frequently assessed cognitive ability across all age groups, paralleling the adult bilingual literature, with memory flexibility and theory of mind also emerging as common targets within infant and preschool age groups. Results are discussed in light of developmental trajectories and assessment methodologies currently available for the cognitive abilities represented in this literature.

Executive Function, Working Memory, and Verbal Fluency in Relation to Non-Verbal Intelligence in Greek-Speaking School-Age Children with Developmental Language Disorder

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is often associated with impairments in working memory (WM), executive functions (EF), and verbal fluency. Moreover, increasing evidence shows poorer performance of children with DLD on non-verbal intelligence tests relative to their typically developing (TD) peers. Yet, the degree and generality of relevant difficulties remain unclear. The present study aimed at investigating WM capacity, key EFs and verbal fluency in relation to non-verbal intelligence in Greek-speaking school-age children with DLD, compared to TD peers (8–9 years). To our knowledge, the present study is the first to attempt a systematic relevant assessment with Greek-speaking school-age children, complementing previous studies mostly involving English-speaking participants. The results showed that children with DLD scored lower than TD peers on the non-verbal intelligence measure. Groups did not differ in the inhibition measures obtained (tapping resistance to either distractor or proactive interference), but children with DLD were outperformed by TD peers in the WM capacity, updating, monitoring (mixing cost), and verbal fluency (phonological and semantic) measures. The effects showed limited (in the case of backward digit recall) or no dependence on non-verbal intelligence. Findings are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical implications as well as in relation to future lines of research.

Emotional devaluation in ignoring and forgetting as a function of adolescent development

We know that emotion and cognition interact to guide goal-directed behavior. Accordingly, it has recently been shown that distracting stimuli (Raymond, Fenske, & Tavassoli, 2003) and instructed to-be-forgotten items (Vivas, Marful, Panagiotidou, & Bajo, 2016) are emotionally devaluated. The devaluation by inhibition hypothesis (Raymond, Fenske, & Tavassoli, 2003) is the main theoretical explanation of these effects. However, we know little about how the cognition-emotion interplay is further modulated by development, and particularly, by changes in inhibitory control and affective processing within the adolescence period. In the present study we combined a selective attention task with faces, and a selective memory (directed forgetting paradigm) task with words, with a pleasantness evaluation task to address this question in three age groups; younger adolescents, older adolescents and young adults. Younger adolescents exhibited worse accuracy in the attention task, lower overall recognition of words in the memory task, and a smaller in magnitude directed forgetting effect in the latter, relative to the two older groups. That is, they showed less efficient inhibitory control in attention and memory selection. Despite this, all groups showed similar devaluation effects of the distractor faces and the to-be-forgotten words. Our findings do not fully support an inhibition account of such effects. Yet, they support the robustness of the forgetting devaluation effect, replicating the findings of Vivas, Marful, Panagiotidou, and Bajo (2016) with a Greek version of the task and in a bigger sample of participants.

The Impact of Bilingualism on Executive Functions in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review Based on the PRISMA Method

Approximately half of the world's population is bilingual or multilingual. The bilingual advantage theory claims that the constant need to control both known languages, that are always active in the brain, to use the one suitable for each specific context improves cognitive functions and specifically executive functions. However, some authors do not agree on the bilingual effect, given the controversial results of studies on this topic. This systematic review aims to summarize the results of studies on the relationship between bilingualism and executive functions. The review was conducted according to PRISMA-statement through searches in the scientific database PsychINFO, PsycARTICLES, MEDLINE, and PUBMED. Studies included in this review had at least one bilingual and monolingual group, participants aged between 5 and 17 years, and at least one executive function measure. Studies on second language learners, multilingual people, and the clinical population were excluded. Fifty-three studies were included in the systematic review. Evidence supporting the bilingual effect seems to appear when assessing inhibition and cognitive flexibility, but to disappear when working memory is considered. The inconsistent results of the studies do not allow drawing definite conclusions on the bilingual effect. Further studies are needed; they should consider the role of some modulators (e.g., language history and context, methodological differences) on the observed results.

Meta-Analysis Reveals a Bilingual Advantage That Is Dependent on Task and Age

Debate continues on whether a bilingual advantage exists with respect to executive functioning. This report synthesized the results of 170 studies to test whether the bilingual advantage is dependent on the task used to assess executive functioning and the age of the participants. The results of the meta-analyses indicated that the bilingual advantage was both task- and age-specific. Bilinguals were significantly faster than monolinguals (Hedges' g values ranged from 0.23 to 0.34), and significantly more accurate than monolinguals (Hedges' g values ranged between 0.18 and 0.49) on four out of seven tasks. Also, an effect of age was found whereby the bilingual advantage was larger for studies comprising samples aged 50-years and over (Hedges' g = 0.49), compared to those undertaken with participants aged between 18 and 29 years (Hedges' g = 0.12). The extent to which the bilingual advantage might be due to publication bias was assessed using multiple methods. These were Egger's Test of Asymmetry, Duval and Tweedie's Trim and Fill, Classic Fail-Safe N, and PET-PEESE. Publication bias was only found when using Egger's Test of Asymmetry and PET-PEESE method, but not when using the other methods. This review indicates that if bilingualism does enhance executive functioning, the effects are modulated by task and age. This may arise because using multiple languages has a highly specific effect on executive functioning which is only observable in older, relative to younger, adults. The finding that publication bias was not uniformly detected across the different methods raises questions about the impact that unpublished (or undetected) studies have on meta-analyses of this literature.

Bilinguals' inhibitory control and attentional processes in a visual perceptual task

The aim was to examine theories of bilingual inhibitory control superiority in the visual domain. In an ambiguous figure task, the ability to reverse (switch) interpretations (e.g., duck-rabbit) was examined in 3-5-year-olds bilinguals and monolinguals (N = 67). Bilingualism was no performance predictor in conceptual tasks (Droodle task, false belief task, ambiguous figures production task) that did not pose inhibitory demands. Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in the ability to reverse, suggesting superior inhibitory capacity per se. Once reversal was experienced there was no difference in the time it took to reverse or reversal frequency between bilinguals and monolinguals. Bayesian analyses confirmed statistical result patterns. Findings support the established view of bilinguals' superior domain-general inhibitory control. This might be brought to bear by attending the environment differently.

Is there a bilingual advantage on interference-control tasks? A multiverse meta-analysis of global reaction time and interference cost

A contentious issue in contemporary psycholinguistics is whether bilingualism enhances executive functions. Here, we report a meta-analysis of 80 studies (253 effect sizes) comparing performance of monolinguals and bilinguals on non-verbal interference-control tasks, while examining potential moderators of effects on two dependent variables (DVs): global reaction time (RT) and interference cost. We used a multiverse approach to determine how robust conclusions were to several dataset construction and analysis decisions. In our "preferred" analysis, using a broad definition of bilinguals and standard versions of interference-control tasks, there was a very small but significant bilingual advantage for global RT (g =.13), which became non-significant once corrected for publication bias. For interference cost, there was a very small but significant bilingual advantage (g =.11). Effects were not significantly moderated by task or participant age, but were moderated by an interaction between age of second language acquisition (AoA) and the DV. Unexpectedly, larger effect sizes for interference cost were observed for studies involving bilinguals with late as opposed to early AoA. The multiverse analysis produced results largely consistent with the preferred analysis, confirming our conclusion that evidence for a bilingual advantage on interference-control tasks is weak.

A Bilingual Advantage? An Appeal for a Change in Perspective and Recommendations for Future Research

The debate on possible cognitive advantages bilinguals have over monolinguals continues to occupy the research community. There is an ever-growing research body focusing on adjudicating whether there is, in fact, an effect of using two or more languages regularly on cognition. In this paper, we briefly review some of the more pertinent literature that has attempted to identify attenuating, modulating, and confounding factors in research comparing monolingual and bilingual populations, and we highlight issues that should be taken into account in future research to move forward as a research community. At the same time, we argue for a change in perspective concerning what is deemed an advantage and what is not and argue for more ecologically valid research that investigates real-life advantages.

No evidence for effects of Turkish immigrant children's bilingualism on executive functions

Recent research has increasingly questioned the bilingual advantage for executive functions (EF). We used structural equation modeling in a large sample of Turkish immigrant and German monolingual children (N = 337; aged 5–15 years) to test associations between bilingualism and EF. Our data showed no significant group differences between Turkish immigrant and German children’s EF skills while taking into account maternal education, child gender, age, and working memory (i.e., digit span backwards). Moreover, neither Turkish immigrant children’s proficiency in either language nor their home language environment predicted EF. Our findings offer important new evidence in light of the ongoing debate about the existence of a bilingual advantage for EF.

Effect of language proficiency on proactive occulo-motor control among bilinguals

We examined the effect of language proficiency on the status and dynamics of proactive inhibitory control in an occulo-motor cued go-no-go task. The first experiment was designed to demonstrate the effect of second language proficiency on proactive inhibitory cost and adjustments in control by evaluating previous trial effects. This was achieved by introducing uncertainty about the upcoming event (go or no-go stimulus). High- and low- proficiency Hindi-English bilingual adults participated in the study. Saccadic latencies and errors were taken as the measures of performance. The results demonstrate a significantly lower proactive inhibitory cost and better up-regulation of proactive control under uncertainty among high- proficiency bilinguals. An analysis based on previous trial effects suggests that high- proficiency bilinguals were found to be better at releasing inhibition and adjustments in control, in an ongoing response activity in the case of uncertainty. To further understand the dynamics of proactive inhibitory control as a function of proficiency, the second experiment was designed to test the default versus temporary state hypothesis of proactive inhibitory control. Certain manipulations were introduced in the cued go-no-go task in order to make the upcoming go or no-go trial difficult to predict, which increased the demands on the implementation and maintenance of proactive control. High- proficiency bilinguals were found to rely on a default state of proactive inhibitory control whereas low- proficiency bilinguals were found to rely on temporary/transient proactive inhibition. Language proficiency, as one of the measures of bilingualism, was found to influence proactive inhibitory control and appears to modulate the dynamics of proactive inhibitory control.

Developmental associations between bilingual experience and inhibitory control trajectories in Head Start children

Children from lower socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds tend to be at-risk for executive function (EF) impairments by the time they are in preschool, placing them at an early disadvantage for academic success. The present study examined the potentially protective role of bilingual experience on the development of inhibitory control (IC) in 1146 Head Start preschoolers who were followed for an 18-month period during the transition to kindergarten as part of the longitudinal Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) 2009 study. Using three waves of data, we predicted individual variation in developmental trajectories of IC for three groups that differed in bilingual experience-English monolinguals, Spanish-English bilinguals, and a group of children who transitioned from being Spanish monolingual to Spanish-English bilinguals during the course of the study. Compared to their English monolingual peers, bilingual children from Spanish-speaking homes showed higher IC performance at Head Start entry, as well as steeper IC growth over time. Children who were Spanish monolingual at the beginning of Head Start showed the lowest IC performance at baseline. However, their rate of IC growth exceeded that of children who remained English monolingual and did not differ from that of their peers who entered Head Start being bilingual. These results suggest that acquiring bilingualism and continued bilingual experience are associated with more rapid IC development during the transition from preschool to kindergarten in children from lower SES backgrounds.