What did Simon say? Revisiting the bilingual advantage

Abstract

Bilingual children often outperform monolingual children in tasks of cognitive control. This advantage may be a consequence of the fact that bilinguals have more practice controlling attention due to an ongoing need to manage two languages. However, existing evidence is limited because possible differences in ethnicity and socioeconomic status have not been properly controlled. To address this issue, we administered the Simon task to bilingual and monolingual children of identical ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Bilingual and monolingual children performed identically, whereas children from higher SES families were advantaged relative to children from lower SES families. Controlling differences in SES and ethnicity may attenuate the bilingual advantage in cognitive control.

Bilingualism and conversational understanding in young children

“…The role of SES in producing a bilingual advantage has been studied in relation to EF performance and is complicated by language status and the degree to which bilingual language proficiency is balanced (Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008;Pearson, 2007). Most relevant to the present research are data from Canadian 6-and 7-year-old bilinguals with a similar level of vocabulary in English and French that indicate the bilingual advantage on at least some EF tasks does not emerge when the SES of the bilingual and monolingual groups is controlled (Morton & Harper, 2007). In our investigation, there were no EF differences on either the DN or CS tasks between the monolingual Slovenian and bilingual children.…”

Do Bilinguals Have an Advantage in Theory of Mind? A Meta-Analysis

“…This advantage, which is supported by many studies (Bialystok, 1999;Costa et al, 2008), has been communicated to the general public through significant media coverage (Bhattacharjee, 2012;Reville, 2014). Yet, several recent studies have failed to replicate this finding (Morton and Harper, 2007;Paap and Greenberg, 2013;Antón et al, 2014), leading many researchers to doubt its validity (de Bruin et al, 2015;Paap et al, 2016), and creating a division in the bilingualism research community between believers and skeptics (Bak, 2016;Bialystok, 2016;Titone et al, 2017). This ambiguous state of the literature is not limited to executive functioning.…”

Identifying a Threshold for the Executive Function Advantage in Bilingual Children

“…Training Test Bialystok, Craik, Klein, and Viswanathan (2004) 8 28 Morton and Harper (2007) 2 28 Martin-Rhee and Bialystok (2008) 8 40 Paap and Greenberg (2013) 20 40 (Poarch & van Hell, 2012) 24 84 7 our study 8 48 Table 4 Number of critical trials in the Simon task: cross-study comparison…”

“…A number of studies controlling for SES indeed found no bilingual advantage (e.g. Morton & Harper, 2007;Paap & Greenberg, 2013;Duñabeitia et al, 2015). However, evidence also exists of a bilingual advantage in socio-economically deprived children (Engel de Abreu et al, 2012;Calvo & Bialystok, 2014).…”