EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Is there a bilingual advantage in auditory attention among children? A systematic review and meta-analysis of standardized auditory attention tests

Wenfu Bao, Claude Alain, Michael Thaut and Monika Molnar

PLOS ONE, 2024, vol. 19, issue 5, 1-18

Abstract: A wealth of research has investigated the associations between bilingualism and cognition, especially in regards to executive function. Some developmental studies reveal different cognitive profiles between monolinguals and bilinguals in visual or audio-visual attention tasks, which might stem from their attention allocation differences. Yet, whether such distinction exists in the auditory domain alone is unknown. In this study, we compared differences in auditory attention, measured by standardized tests, between monolingual and bilingual children. A comprehensive literature search was conducted in three electronic databases: OVID Medline, OVID PsycInfo, and EBSCO CINAHL. Twenty studies using standardized tests to assess auditory attention in monolingual and bilingual participants aged less than 18 years were identified. We assessed the quality of these studies using a scoring tool for evaluating primary research. For statistical analysis, we pooled the effect size in a random-effects meta-analytic model, where between-study heterogeneity was quantified using the I2 statistic. No substantial publication bias was observed based on the funnel plot. Further, meta-regression modelling suggests that test measure (accuracy vs. response times) significantly affected the studies’ effect sizes whereas other factors (e.g., participant age, stimulus type) did not. Specifically, studies reporting accuracy observed marginally greater accuracy in bilinguals (g = 0.10), whereas those reporting response times indicated faster latency in monolinguals (g = -0.34). There was little difference between monolingual and bilingual children’s performance on standardized auditory attention tests. We also found that studies tend to include a wide variety of bilingual children but report limited language background information of the participants. This, unfortunately, limits the potential theoretical contributions of the reviewed studies. Recommendations to improve the quality of future research are discussed.

Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0299393 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 99393&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0299393

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0299393

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().

 
Page updated 2025-05-31
Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0299393