ĭespite these controversies, few researchers would argue that there are zero differences between children who speak one compared to more than one language. Studies that make a point of taking these differences into account often find no differences between groups of children on tasks such as the ANT. Some argue that if you take these things into account then the bilingual advantage would be diminished. As most of the studies that consider the bilingual advantage have been run in countries like the UK and the USA, children often differ on measures of ethnicity and the relative advantage or disadvantage of their backgrounds. However, not everyone agrees that these differences are due to bilingualismĪ particular difficulty when running studies with bi- and monolingual speakers is that they tend to differ in important ways other than their linguistic experience. So these children showed a specific advantage for conflict, when attending to one thing and ignoring another. Interestingly, one group found that bilingual English-Spanish kindergarten children in America outperformed their English monolingual peers when they had to select one thing and ignore another, but not on impulse control when they had to wait for things. Another group found a bilingual advantage in speed of response in 5 to 14 year olds, but only in those who had learned two languages before the age of three, suggesting that an advantage in executive control relies on having to flip between languages as you first acquire language. The authors described bilingualism as ‘linguistic multitasking’. One study which showed this with 8 to 11 year olds found bilingual and trilingual children to have an equal advantage over monolingual children.

Those who find it hard to ignore the flanking arrows will be quicker when all the arrows point the same way, and slower when they don’t.īilingual children have been shown to be quicker on trials with flanking arrows that face the wrong way that is, they can better ignore irrelevant distracting information. One such task is the Attention Network Test (ANT ), in which you have to press one of two keys as quickly as possible to show which way a central arrow is facing, the arrow may be flanked with arrows facing the same way, arrows facing the opposite way, or by no arrows.

The kind of tasks that researchers use to test the bilingual advantage typically involve responding to something while ignoring something else.

Bilingual children do outperform their monolingual peers on some tasks In the classroom this should mean that children who speak more than one language are able to focus better on what they’re doing while ignoring distractions, and flip between activities more easily. The bilingual advantage theory says that having this linguistic flexibility also results in better control in non-linguistic tasks. It’s thought that bi- (or multi-) lingual children are better equipped for this as a result of experience with two things: firstly, flipping between languages as they speak to different individuals and secondly, using a word in one language while simultaneously ignoring the corresponding word in their other language (or languages). Executive control refers to our ability to manipulate and control our attention: to inhibit responses, ignore irrelevant stimuli, and flip between tasks. The idea here is that children who speak more than one language find a type of thinking known as executive control easier than those who only speak one language this difference is known as the ‘bilingual advantage’.

Advantages of being monolingual