Advantages of Executive Processing in Bilingual Students

Abstract

A research study was conducted measuring the differences in attention control for bilingual English and Spanish speaking students and monolingual English-speaking students in second and third grade. Attention control was measured using a series of listening tasks, one being a singular listening task and one being a dichotic listening task. The students were asked to listen to audio recordings of English words and to recall the words that they remembered. The recall of the monolingual and bilingual students was recorded for each task and the mean differences between the singular and dichotic listening tasks were found for each group. The mean difference between the bilingual students’ recall for the singular and dichotic listening tasks was lower than the mean difference for the monolingual students, showing that the bilingual students’ recall without distraction was more similar to their recall with distraction. These findings support the hypothesis that the bilingual students would have significantly higher attending recall than the monolingual students, demonstrating their heightened ability to control their attention.