Bilingual children perform worse than monolinguals on attention tasks with verbal stimuli but not non-verbal ones¶
Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · reviewr3·q2
Currency · newest study 2020 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person
Subclaims¶
Reading the evidence codes
q is the design tier, i the impact, n the sample, and the kind with its r
the rigour judged within that kind: what each code means.
This claim: no standardized effect is recorded in observations/ for it yet, so no benchmark reading is possible.
q2 i? In the reviewed attention evidence, bilinguals performed significantly worse than monolinguals on the task with verbal stimuli, while no differences emerged on the non-verbal task. → Giovannoli J 2020
Evidence¶
Giovannoli J 2020¶
Giovannoli J, Martella D, Federico F, Pirchio S and Casagrande M (2020) The Impact of Bilingualism on Executive Functions in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review Based on the PRISMA Method. Front. Psychol. 11:574789. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.574789
q2 · i? · review · r3
Review narrative of Calvo and Bialystok (2014) within the attention results: the Pair Cancellation Subtest assessed non-verbal visual attention and the WISC-IV cancellation subtest assessed verbal-visual attention; the quote reports the contrast between the two stimulus types. No effect size printed.
"In the task with verbal stimuli, b ilinguals performed significantly worse than monolinguals, while in the task with non-verbal stimuli, no differences emerged between the two groups."
Discussion¶
Related Claims¶
- The bilingual effect tends to emerge in more complex experimental tasks with higher control demands
- Monolingual and bilingual children perform the dichotic comprehension task equivalently, with both groups finding English–English interference hardest — related
- Unattended Musical Rain streams were better reconstructed than unattended linguistic distractors in both groups, with stronger MuR encoding in monolinguals — related
- The study found no evidence for enhanced attentional capacity in bilingual children, behaviourally or neurally — reports the opposite
- Bilingual children show a flatter pattern of attended-speech encoding across conditions, driven by weaker encoding in low- or no-interference conditions — related
- Bilingual children solve the Sky Search selective attention task faster than monolinguals across the studies using it — related
Page metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
type |
claim |
id |
verbal-stimuli-bilingual-worse-attention-tasks |
title |
Bilingual children perform worse than monolinguals on attention tasks with verbal stimuli but not non-verbal ones |
description |
Bilingual children perform worse than monolinguals on attention tasks with verbal stimuli but not non-verbal ones |
status |
review |
evidence_strength |
weak |
newest_evidence |
2020 |
generated |
by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-10-16 |
trust |
unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content |
sources |
1 — giovannoli-j-2020 |
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