Dataset Information

The Bilingual Advantage in Children's Executive Functioning Is Not Related to Language Status: A Meta-Analytic Review.

ABSTRACT: There is considerable debate about whether bilingual children have an advantage in executive functioning relative to monolingual children. In the current meta-analysis, we addressed this debate by comprehensively reviewing the available evidence. We synthesized data from published studies and unpublished data sets, which equated to 1,194 effect sizes from 10,937 bilingual and 12,477 monolingual participants between the ages of 3 and 17 years. Bilingual language status had a small overall effect on children's executive functioning (g = .08, 95% confidence interval = [.01, .14]). However, the effect of language status on children's executive functioning was indistinguishable from zero (g = -.04) after we adjusted for publication bias. Further, no significant effects were apparent within the executive-attention domain, in which the effects of language status have been hypothesized to be most pronounced (g = .06, 95% confidence interval = [-.02, .14]). Taken together, available evidence suggests that the bilingual advantage in children's executive functioning is small, variable, and potentially not attributable to the effect of language status.

SUBMITTER: Lowe CJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8641133 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The Bilingual Advantage in Children's Executive Functioning Is Not Related to Language Status: A Meta-Analytic Review.

Lowe Cassandra J CJ Cho Isu I Goldsmith Samantha F SF Morton J Bruce JB

Psychological science 20210702 7

There is considerable debate about whether bilingual children have an advantage in executive functioning relative to monolingual children. In the current meta-analysis, we addressed this debate by comprehensively reviewing the available evidence. We synthesized data from published studies and unpublished data sets, which equated to 1,194 effect sizes from 10,937 bilingual and 12,477 monolingual participants between the ages of 3 and 17 years. Bilingual language status had a small overall effect ...[more]

PMID: 34213379

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Project description:Patterns of language impairment in multilingual speakers with post-stroke aphasia are diverse: in some cases the language deficits are parallel, that is, all languages are impaired relatively equally, whereas in other cases deficits are differential, that is, one language is more impaired than the other(s). This diversity stems from the intricate structure of the multilingual language system, which is shaped by a complex interplay of influencing factors, such as age of language acquisition, frequency of language use, premorbid proficiency, and linguistic similarity between one's languages. Previous theoretical reviews and empirical studies shed some light on these factors, however no clear answers have been provided. The goals of this review were to provide a timely update on the increasing number of reported cases in the last decade and to offer a systematic analysis of the potentially influencing variables. One hundred and thirty cases from 65 studies were included in the present systematic review and effect sizes from 119 cases were used in the meta-analysis. Our analysis revealed better performance in L1 compared to L2 in the whole sample of bilingual speakers with post-stroke aphasia. However, the magnitude of this difference was influenced by whether L2 was learned early in childhood or later: those who learned L2 before 7 years of age showed comparable performance in both of their languages contrary to the bilinguals who learned L2 after 7 years of age and showed better performance in L1 compared to L2. These robust findings were moderated mildly by premorbid proficiency and frequency of use. Finally, linguistic similarity did not appear to influence the magnitude of the difference in performance between L1 and L2. Our findings from the early bilingual subgroup were in line with the previous reviews which included mostly balanced early bilinguals performing comparably in both languages. Our findings from the late bilingual subgroup stressed the primacy of L1 and the importance of age of L2 learning. In addition, the evidence from the present review provides support for theories emphasizing the role of premorbid proficiency and language use in language impairment patterns in bilingual aphasia.

Project description:Purpose The language that children hear early in life is associated with their speech-language outcomes. This line of research relies on naturalistic observations of children's language input, often captured with daylong audio recordings. However, the large quantity of data that daylong recordings generate requires novel analytical tools to feasibly parse thousands of hours of naturalistic speech. This study outlines a new approach to efficiently process and sample from daylong audio recordings made in two bilingual communities, Spanish-English in the United States and Quechua-Spanish in Bolivia, to derive estimates of children's language exposure. Method We employed a general sampling with replacement technique to efficiently estimate two key elements of children's early language environments: (a) proportion of child-directed speech (CDS) and (b) dual language exposure. Proportions estimated from random sampling of 30-s segments were compared to those from annotations over the entire daylong recording (every other segment), as well as parental report of dual language exposure. Results Results showed that approximately 49 min from each recording or just 7% of the overall recording was required to reach a stable proportion of CDS and bilingual exposure. In both speech communities, strong correlations were found between bilingual language estimates made using random sampling and all-day annotation techniques. A strong association was additionally found for CDS estimates in the United States, but this was weaker at the Bolivian site, where CDS was less frequent. Dual language estimates from the audio recordings did not correspond well to estimates derived from parental report collected months apart. Conclusions Daylong recordings offer tremendous insight into children's daily language experiences, but they will not become widely used in developmental research until data processing and annotation time substantially decrease. We show that annotation based on random sampling is a promising approach to efficiently estimate ambient characteristics from daylong recordings that cannot currently be estimated via automated methods.

Dataset Information

The Bilingual Advantage in Children's Executive Functioning Is Not Related to Language Status: A Meta-Analytic Review.

Publications

The Bilingual Advantage in Children's Executive Functioning Is Not Related to Language Status: A Meta-Analytic Review.

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