Bilingual children show advantages in nonverbal auditory executive function task

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that bilinguals have greater control over attentional resources than monolinguals in nonverbal tasks, perhaps reflecting domain-general enhancements of executive functioning (EF). Most studies of this bilingual advantage have used tasks with visual stimuli whereas fewer studies have examined attentional control in bilinguals in auditory tasks. We studied components of EF in two Go/No-Go auditory tasks with (1) nonverbal auditory stimuli and (2) verbal auditory stimuli in 5-year-old Spanish–English bilingual (n = 30) and English-speaking monolingual (n = 30) children matched on age, gender, short-term memory (digits forward subtest), and early reading skills (phoneme awareness and letter naming). The Go/No-Go tasks were modeled after a continuous performance task (CPT) (Mahone, Pillion, & Hiemenz, 2001) and included additional blocks of trials to measure the effects of switching targets. The bilingual children made fewer errors and had shorter reaction times (RTs) in the second block of the nonverbal auditory tasks than the monolinguals, but there were no differences on the verbal auditory task. Our results suggest that early bilingualism may confer advantages in young children for responding to nonverbal auditory stimuli under conditions that require cognitive flexibility.