Abstract
Bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals in a variety of tasks that do not tap into linguistic processes. The origin of this bilingual advantage has been questioned in recent years. While some authors argue that the reason behind this apparent advantage is bilinguals' enhanced executive functioning, inhibitory skills and/or monitoring abilities, other authors suggest that the locus of these differences between bilinguals and monolinguals may lie in uncontrolled factors or incorrectly matched samples. In the current study we tested a group of 180 bilingual children and a group of 180 carefully matched monolinguals in a child-friendly version of the ANT task. Following recent evidence from similar studies with children, our results showed no bilingual advantage at all, given that the performance of the two groups in the task and the indices associated with the individual attention networks were highly similar and statistically indistinguishable.
Highlights
The so-called “bilingual advantage” (Kroll and Bialystok, 2013), broadly understood as enhanced executive cognitive control for bilinguals as compared to monolinguals, has attracted very much interest in recent years
GENERAL DISCUSSION The aim of this study was to investigate whether bilingual children exhibit an advantage as compared to their monolingual peers in the Attentional Network Test (ANT) task, which has been typically considered the paradigm best suited to explore the different attention networks
As described in the Introduction, different explanations have been given for the so-called bilingual advantage; but all of them coincide in suggesting that the continuous use and control of two languages provides bilinguals with a set of enhanced attention skills that leads to the emergence of differences between monolinguals and bilinguals in different non-linguistic tasks closely associated with executive control
Summary
The so-called “bilingual advantage” (Kroll and Bialystok, 2013), broadly understood as enhanced executive cognitive control for bilinguals as compared to monolinguals, has attracted very much interest in recent years. While there has been considerable evidence to date supporting a bilingual advantage, very recently there has been an increase in the number of studies showing a similar performance of bilinguals and monolinguals in non-linguistic executive control tasks. One of the most commonly studied tasks in which bilinguals have been claimed to outperform monolinguals is the classic Stroop task (Stroop, 1935) In this task, participants have to name the color in which target words are printed. The Stroop effect was found to be smaller in bilingual participants than in their monolingual peers and this difference has been claimed to be especially evident in older bilinguals when compared to their monolingual counterparts (e.g., Bialystok et al, 2008; Hernández et al, 2010). As we will explain below, recent results have challenged these findings showing negligible differences between bilinguals and monolinguals in the Stroop task (Duñabeitia et al, 2014)
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