Interference suppression vs. response inhibition: An explanation for the absence of a bilingual advantage in preschoolers’ Stroop task performance
Section snippets
Bilingual advantage
The regular use of two or more languages benefits controlled attention, with advantages found among bilingual preschoolers, school-aged children, and adults on a variety of tasks requiring controlled attention (for reviews, see Adesope et al., 2010, Hilchey and Klein, 2011). This bilingual advantage arises in part from the management of two (or more) linguistic representations, which results in extensive practice in selective attention and cognitive flexibility. Among preschoolers, the
Participants
Participants were healthy, typically developing preschool children with either bilingual (Spanish and English) or monolingual (English) experience. All of the children attended full-time child care centers and none met the age requirement for entry into public school kindergarten. Our final sample included 26 bilingual (16 females; mean age = 49.8 months, SD = 7.5 months, range 37–63 months) and 25 monolingual (12 females; mean age = 50.1 months, SD = 8.6 months, range 37–58 months) children. An
Results
BST trials with a mean response time under 300 ms were removed as they were deemed too fast to represent responses to the test items. These occurred on only 36 of 940 test trials. In addition, a few children were unable to contribute data to one of the two tasks due to interruptions while testing or failure to meet accuracy criteria in practice trials. In these cases, data from the completed task but not the interrupted task were included.
Preliminary analyses determined the variables to be
Discussion and conclusions
We replicated previous results in finding no difference between monolingual and bilingual preschoolers’ performance on the Day/Night task. We observed the bilingual advantage, however, using a task that incorporated key aspects of the Color/Word Stroop. In performing this task, bilingual preschoolers made significantly fewer incongruent errors in comparison to their monolingual peers, and the incongruent trials were significantly more difficult than congruent trials for monolingual but not
Acknowledgements
Research reported in this publication was supported in part by a predoctoral fellowship from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number T32HD007376 through the Center for Developmental Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to Alena G. Esposito. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of
References (32)
- et al.
Emerging bilingualism: Dissociating advantages for metalinguistic awareness and executive control
Cognition
(2012) - et al.
The relationship between measures of executive function, motor performance and externalizing behavior in 5- and 6-year-old children
Human Movement Science
(2006) - et al.
Distinct neural correlates for two types of inhibition in bilinguals: Response inhibition versus interference suppression
Brain and Cognition
(2010) - et al.
The effects of bilingualism on toddlers’ executive functioning
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
(2011) - et al.
Color-object interference in young children: A Stroop effect in children 3½–6½ years old
Cognitive Development
(2005) - et al.
“Oops!”: Performance correlates of everyday attentional failures in traumatic brain injured and normal subjects
Neuropsychologia
(1997) - et al.
Bilingualism and conversational understanding in young children
Cognition
(2009) - et al.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of the cognitive correlates of bilingualism
Review of Educational Research
(2010) - et al.
Identification and description of new tests of executive functioning in children
Child Neuropsychology
(1999) Global–local and trail-making tasks by monolingual and bilingual children: Beyond inhibition
Developmental Psychology
(2010)
Cognitive control and lexical access in younger and older bilinguals
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
Attention and inhibition in bilingual children: Evidence from the dimensional change card sort task
Developmental Science
Immature frontal lobe contributions to cognitive control in children: Evidence from fMRI
Neuron
Bilingual experience and executive functioning in young children
Developmental Science
Not quite as grown-up as we like to think: Parallels between cognition in childhood and adulthood
Psychological Science
Cited by (62)
Putting the pieces together: Cognitive correlates of self-derivation of new knowledge in elementary school classrooms
2022, Journal of Experimental Child PsychologyThe relationship between temperamental dimensions and inhibitory control in early childhood: Implications for language acquisition
2020, Infant Behavior and DevelopmentCitation Excerpt :The effect of interference due to the distractors must be inhibited to produce a correct response. Interference suppression is the ability to manage the conflict at the level of the stimulus (Bunge et al., 2002; Esposito, Baker-Ward, & Mueller, 2013; Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008). In accordance with the hypothesis that the emergent EFs in the third year are better represented by a unified dimension, we hypothesize that the two dimensions of inhibition are still unified before age three (Gandolfi et al., 2014).