Abstract
PurposeAttention and language are hypothesized to interact in bilingual children and in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). In children who are bilingual, attentional control may be enhanced by repeated experience regulating 2 languages. In children with DLD, subtle weaknesses in sustained attention may relate to impaired language processing. This study measured attentional control and sustained attention in monolingual and bilingual children with and without DLD in order to examine the potential influences of bilingualism and DLD, as well as their intersection, on attention.MethodMonolingual English-only and bilingual Spanish–English children aged 6–8 years were categorized into participant groups based on eligibility testing and parent interviews. Parent interviews included standardized assessment of language environment and parent concern regarding language. Participants completed 2 nonlinguistic computerized assessments: a flanker task to measure attentional control and a continuous performance task to measure sustained attention.ResultsOne hundred nine children met all eligibility criteria for inclusion in a participant group. Regression models predicting performance on the attention tasks were similar for both sustained attention and attentional control. For both tasks, DLD was a significant predictor, and bilingualism was not. Measuring bilingualism continuously using parent-reported exposure did not alter results.ConclusionsThis study found no evidence of a “bilingual cognitive advantage” on 2 types of attention among sequential Spanish–English bilingual children but also found a negative effect of DLD that was consistent across both types of attention and both bilingual and monolingual children. Results are consistent with the broader literature on subtle nonlinguistic deficits in children with DLD and suggest these deficits are minimally affected by diverse linguistic experience.
Highlights
Attention and language are hypothesized to interact in bilingual children and in children with developmental language disorder (DLD)
Using the children who met all criteria for inclusion in one of the four groups (BI-DLD, BI-typically developing (TD), monolingual children with typical language development (MO-TD), monolingual children with DLD (MO-DLD); see Figure 1), we examined the effects of bilingualism and DLD on attention task performance using theoretically derived hierarchical regression analyses
Post hoc analysis with least significant difference adjustment indicated that the MO-DLD group differed from the MO-TD group (p = .002)
Summary
Attention and language are hypothesized to interact in bilingual children and in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Two prominent examples of such interactions are the proposed influence of dual language exposure on the development of attention and the possible influence of attention on the development of. We examine the attention skills of monolingual and bilingual children with and without DLD in order to explore how language exposure may influence aspects of developing attention, how specific attentional weaknesses may influence language development, and how these two phenomena may interact with each other. Posner & Petersen, 1990) in order to interpret recent work on two specific components of attention: sustained attention and attentional control These components of attention are the focus of the current study because of their prominence in the literatures on bilingualism and on DLD and their potential to highlight interactions between attention and language
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