Does bilingualism influence children's attention when they are of low SES?

What is it about?

Bilingualism seems to influence one's cognitive abilities, even in young ages. However, we wanted to see whether this bilingual effect would remain if the bilingual children were of low socioeconomic status (SES),as low SES has long been found to have negative effects in cognition. Thus, we tested bilingual and monolingual children in their attention function. We found that, when the participants of both tested groups are of low SES, bilingualism does not seem to influence their attention ability after all. Although there does seem to be a bilingual effect in a specific area of executive attention that depends on how "good" one is in switching between languages, it was not large enough to make the bilingual children "better" in executive attention tasks than their monolingual peers.

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Why is it important?

Our study is important for two reasons: Firstly, because it includes children of only low SES. In previous work on the bilingual effect in attention, many studies finding a positive bilingual effect have included either bilingual children of middle-to-high SES or have not controlled for the SES factor, thus confounding their results. Secondly, because we used a computerized language-switching task to measure the level of bilingualism, as opposed to other studies using only self-reports. Our task is more objective than self-reports in measuring bilingualism, thus we can claim to possibly have a more clear insight in the bilingual effect in attention.

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