Bilingualism is a skill that people acquire through either being raised in a bilingual household or seeking to learn a new language to increase their skills. It is an interesting idea to compare bilingualism and attention to one another because As we heard from Ashley Chung-Fat-Yim, bilingualism plays a big role in our development, especially in terms of our cognitive development. Attention is a multifaceted cognitive process, which might play into how both bilingualism and attention aren't a straight forward relationship. There are multiple types of attention, which, as discussed, can be affected by different developmental experiences with bilingualism.
Multiple studies discuss how bilingualism leads to better performance on different tasks, such as working memory. In a study by Friesen, D.C. et al., participants were able to identify the target more quickly when the target was highly discriminable with fewer distractors. They found that bilinguals were significantly faster than monolinguals in identifying the target when it was more difficult with more distractors. This was evidence for better visual attention in bilinguals.
As seen in Chung-Fat-Yim's article, she addresses the inconsistencies other studies had between bilingualism and monolingualism, as they treat it as a dichotomous variable. Her article makes the argument for looking at more factors that address the complexity of bilingualism and attention.
Resources:
Friesen, D. C., Latman, V., Calvo, A., & Bialystok, E. (2015). Attention during visual search: The benefit of bilingualism. International Journal of Bilingualism, 19(6), 693-702. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006914534331
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