Abstract
Are there differences between bilinguals and monolinguals in non-linguistic cognitive processes related to attention? Recent interest in this question, which has a long history, was stimulated by ideas presented in Bialystok’s 2001 book: Bilingualism in development: Language, literacy, and cognition. Because attention is a multi-faceted construct Costa et al. (Cognition 106(1):59–86, 2008, Cognition 113(2):135–149, 2009) sought to answer this question using the attention network test (ANT), a simple-to-administer tool that was designed to measure the efficacy of three attention networks: alerting, orienting and executive control. Using the ANT Database, a recently developed repository of data extracted from studies that have used the ANT to answer any question, we identified 16 papers that followed Costa’s pioneering use of the ANT to address the question whether bilingualism is associated with differences in attention. In this paper we begin by reviewing the methods and findings from Costa’s studies, and then report the results of three meta-analyses (conducted separately for children, young adults and middle-aged adults) of the data reported in these 16 papers. Whereas, there were no noteworthy effects of language status on alerting or orienting in any group, our meta-analysis of the studies that tested young adults revealed, in agreement with Costa et al. (2008) a bilingual advantage in executive control. A similar bilingual advantage was not observed in the other age groups.
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Notes
Cited over 1100 times according to the Google Scholar (September, 2020).
As noted earlier none of the ANT studies stimulated by Costa's work have looked at sequence effects, so it is not possible to look at (c).
In a dissertation, entitled: “The search for a bilingual advantage in executive functions: a developmental perspective” (Antón-Ustaritz 2017) a modified version of the child ANT was used that included 50% valid and 50% invalid cue. This variant was also described with this dataset in a paper previously published by Antón et al. (2014).
It is important to note that of these two studies, Nair et al. (2017) only reported SEs of network scores graphically (and these SEs were extracted, for the database, using the WebPlotDigitizer (Rohatgi 2011). Curiously and perhaps erroneously, the SE of all three network scores were in bilingual group (7 ms) and monolingual group (19 ms). Further discrepancies were reported in their results as 5 participants were said to have been excluded due to error rates above 40%. However, the degrees of freedom corresponding to the comparative ANOVAS were 34, suggesting all participants may have been included in the analysis. As such, our findings resulting from this experiment may be skewed due to the increased variability in the network scores and overall RTs.
Excerpt from a Dec. 15, 2015 e-mail from Bialystok to Klein (and 36 other scholars with interests in this topic): “Your continual reliance on RT studies with young adults is well-known to produce no performance differences between monolinguals and bilinguals (we have reported such data ourselves) whether there are 20 per group or 2000 per group. So nothing is gained by repeating this evidence.”.
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Funding
This project was made possible by a National Science and Engineering Research Council Discovery grant (RGPIN/04979-2016) awarded to RMK and a Brain Repair Centre—Knowledge Translation Grant (2019) awarded to both authors.
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Data and analysis for this project are hosted on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/ep692/. The web interface for the ANT Database described in this manuscript is hosted at https://attentionnetwork.ca.
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Appendix
Appendix
The hierarchical model used in the present analyses provided the opportunity to quantifiably assess heterogeneity between studies for the three individual age groups across each of the individual measures. These differences would be due to methodological variations or external influences from potential “hidden factors”. This was reported by the relative spread of the intercept and between group differences for each of the network scores and mean RT. As in our previous study using the ANT Database, a main benefit of the hierarchical model used is this measure of heterogeneity and the amount that the intercepts posterior distributions vary from zero further validates the choice of modeling. Figure 7 presents credibly non-zero values of heterogeneity for all intercepts with child participants. Between-group parameters presented as relatively homogenous on all measures except for overall mean RT, which suggests potential differences between studies on the magnitude of this effect. Of course, with participants spanning the ages of 4–17 years of age, developmental changes are ubiquitous.
Posterior distributions for the heterogeneity parameters in the child bilingual comparison as violin plots. Black dots represent the posterior median, thick white bands reflect 50% credibility interval (CrI), and thin white bands reflect 95% CrI
The posterior distributions for heterogeneity of young adult monolingual and bilingual groups are presented in Fig. 8. As shown, non-zero heterogeneity was revealed to be credible on all intercepts for each measure. Zero heterogeneity remained credible on all between-group measures save for differences in mean RT. However, as described in our discussion the directionality of the distribution trends towards credible differences on all measures, suggesting the potential for unmodeled considerations.
Posterior distributions for the heterogeneity parameters in the young adult bilingual comparison as violin plots
Finally, Fig. 9 presents the heterogeneity of the bilingual and monolingual middle- aged participants groups across each measure and mean RT. Zero heterogeneity was credible on all measures except for the alerting, executive, and mean RT intercepts. Given the underpowered datasets in this analysis, it is not surprising that there may been variability in the differences observed between studies.
Posterior distributions for the heterogeneity parameters of the two studies in the middle-aged analysis as violin plots
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Arora, S., Klein, R.M. Comparing bilingual and monolingual performance on the attention network test: meta-analysis of a literature inspired by Albert Costa. J Cult Cogn Sci 4, 243–257 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41809-020-00068-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41809-020-00068-z