According to the US consensus, about one in five Americans speak two or more languages. Bilingualism in America has been growing in recent years as the number of immigrants in America grows. Children of immigrants are being raised bilingual which affects the way their brains develop differently than children who are raised monolingual. One of the brain processes affected by bilingualism is selective attention. Selective attention is the ability of an individual to focus on a particular input for further processing while simultaneously suppressing irrelevant information. (Stevens, Bavelier) Selective attention is linked to inhibitory control, working memory, and the development of a variety of skills including speech, multilingual skills, and arithmetic, making it one of the key foundational skills for academic success.
In the article “How Bilingualism Modulates Selective Attention in Children” by Jacqueline Phelps, Adam Attaheri, and Mirjana Bozic, selective attention is studied in children who are monolingual versus bilingual. The study explored how learning and using multiple languages affects selective attention in children aged 7-12. Using a dichotic listening task and EEG measurements, researchers compared monolingual and bilingual children’s responses to different types of interference and their comprehension scores. Despite similar comprehension scores, bilingual children encoded attended speech differently than monolingual children. This indicates that bilingualism shapes neurocognitive processes related to attention. The study suggests that instead of enhancing attentional capacity, bilinguals redistribute attention to economize resources, aiming to maintain optimal performance. This adaptation reflects modifications in neural mechanisms, showing increased flexibility in resource usage in bilingual children, The findings underscore the impact of bilingualism on attention mechanisms, potentially influencing academic performance and cognitive abilities in children.
The research study, “The Multifaceted Nature of Bilingualism and Attention” by Chung-Fat-Yim, Calvo, and Grundy explores the effect of bilingualism on different types of attention. Studies have shown that selective attention abilities develop early in life and are influenced by linguistic environments. For example, bilingual infants show enhanced attentional control compared to monolingual infants. Bilingualism also impacts tasks like visual search and task switching, where bilinguals often outperform monolinguals due to their more efficient search strategies and cognitive control processes. Alternating attention involves rapidly shifting focus between tasks, such as reading and answering a phone call. Bilingual individuals often perform better on tasks measuring alternation attention, suggesting that bilingualism influences this aspect of attention. Divided attention refers to processing multiple pieces of information simultaneously. While bilingualism may enhance divided attention for some tasks, it depends on factors like language proficiency and the type of task being performed. Disengagement of attention involves shifting the focus from one stimulus to another. Bilinguals typically show faster disengagement from irrelevant information, which contributes to their enhanced performance on tasks requiring attentional flexibility.
The authors discuss the complexity of studying bilingualism and attention, emphasizing that both concepts are often oversimplified in research. Bilinguals show early development of selective attention, possibly to aid language acquisition and discrimination. However, the effect of bilingualism on alternating and divided attention is less clear and depends on factors like task type and age. Bilinguals generally excel at attentional disengagement from irrelevant information. The review also criticizes the use of simplistic tasks in studying bilingual cognition, urging for more ecologically valid tasks that mimic real-world scenarios. Language proficiency and usage are important factors that affect cognitive outcomes in bilinguals, yet they are often overlooked. The study emphasizes the need to consider different bilingual experiences and contexts to fully understand how bilingualism impacts attention.
The connection between these two studies is they both study the effects of bilingualism on attention. The first study specifically studies selective attention in bilingual individuals and does not find significant improvement in the cognitive abilities of selective attention in bilingual individuals. However, it does find differences in brain function when it comes to selective attention in bilingual children. The second study encompasses many different types of attention including selective attention. It finds that bilinguals show early development of selective attention and generally excel at it but does not find very clear results for the other areas of studies like alternating and divided attention. Both studies agree that more in-depth and precise research must be done to explore the true effects of bilingualism on attention.
References:
Chung-Fat-Yim, Ashley, et al. “The Multifaceted Nature of Bilingualism and Attention.” Frontiers in Psychology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 3 June 2022, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9205563/.
Housman, Patty. “Multilingualism on Rise in US: Illusion or Reality?” American University, 15 Nov. 2023, www.american.edu/cas/news/multilingualism-on-rise-in-us-illusion-or-reality.cfm#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20US%20Census,speak%20two%20or%20more%20languages.
Phelps, Jacqueline, et al. “How Bilingualism Modulates Selective Attention in Children.” Nature News, Nature Publishing Group, 16 Apr. 2022, www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-09989-x.
Stevens, Courtney, and Daphne Bavelier. “The Role of Selective Attention on Academic Foundations: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective.” Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 15 Feb. 2012, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3375497/#:~:text=Selective%20attention%20refers%20to%20the,suppressing%20irrelevant%20or%20distracting%20informatio
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