No bilingual advantage in children's attentional disengagement: Congruency and sequential congruency effects in a large sample of monolingual and bilingual children

Samantha F Goldsmith; Mazen El-Baba; Xing He; Daniel J Lewis; Leyla Akoury Dirani; Junsheng Liu; J Bruce Morton

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2023.105692

No bilingual advantage in children's attentional disengagement: Congruency and sequential congruency effects in a large sample of monolingual and bilingual children

J Exp Child Psychol. 2023 Sep:233:105692. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2023.105692. Epub 2023 May 8.

Authors

Samantha F Goldsmith¹, Mazen El-Baba², Xing He³, Daniel J Lewis⁴, Leyla Akoury Dirani⁵, Junsheng Liu³, J Bruce Morton⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, Western University, London, Ontario N6A 3K7, Canada. Electronic address: sgoldsm@uwo.ca.
² Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A8, Canada.
³ School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200050, China.
⁴ Department of Psychology, Western University, London, Ontario N6A 3K7, Canada.
⁵ Department of Psychiatry, American University of Beirut, Beirut 1107 2020, Lebanon.

PMID: 37163827
DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2023.105692

Abstract

According to recent accounts, bilingualism in childhood confers an advantage in a specific domain of executive functioning termed attentional disengagement. The current study tested this hypothesis in 492 children (245 boys; M_age = 10.98 years) from Canada, China, and Lebanon by testing for an association between language status and measures of attentional disengagement. Across the entire sample, monolinguals responded more quickly and accurately than bilinguals on a measure of attentional disengagement but differed in age, socioeconomic status, and general cognitive ability. Differences between monolinguals and bilinguals disappeared when the influence of these confounding variables was controlled using a matched samples analysis (ns = 105). Bayesian analyses further confirmed that the evidence was more likely under the null hypothesis than under the alternative hypothesis. In sum, there was little evidence of an association between language status and attentional disengagement in children.

Keywords: Attentional Disengagement; Bilingualism; Children; Cognitive development; Executive function; Selective Attention.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Attention*
Bayes Theorem
Child
Executive Function
Humans
Language
Male
Multilingualism*