Elsevier

Cognitive Development

Volume 28, Issue 4, October–December 2013, Pages 354-363
Cognitive Development

Interference suppression vs. response inhibition: An explanation for the absence of a bilingual advantage in preschoolers’ Stroop task performance

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2013.09.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Examined absence of a bilingual advantage in preschoolers’ Stroop task performance.

  • Developed an age-appropriate Stroop task that requires interference suppression.

  • Bilingual advantage found in preschoolers on new task but not Day/Night task.

  • Support interference suppression as a key component of the bilingual advantage.

Abstract

The well-documented advantage that bilingual speakers demonstrate across the lifespan on measures of controlled attention is not observed in preschoolers’ performance on Stroop task variations. We examined the role of task demands in explaining this discrepancy. Whereas the Color/Word Stroop used with adult participants requires interference suppression, the Stroop task typically used with preschoolers requires only response inhibition. We developed an age-appropriate conflict task that measures interference suppression. Fifty-one preschool children (26 bilinguals) completed this new Bivalent Shape Task and the Day/Night task used in previous research. Bilingual in comparison to monolingual children performed better on incongruent trials of the Bivalent Shape Task, but did not differ on other measures. The results indicate that the discrepancy between preschoolers and older individuals in performance on Stroop task adaptations results from characteristics of the task rather than developmental differences. Further, the findings provide additional support for the importance of interference suppression as a mechanism underlying the bilingual advantage.

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

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