Bilingual children show advantages in nonverbal auditory executive function task
Foy, Judith G
; Mann, Virginia A.
The International Journal of Bilingualism
18.6 (Dec 2014): 717-729.
; Mann, Virginia A.
The International Journal of Bilingualism18.6 (Dec 2014): 717-729.
Abstract
Most studies of bilingual advantage have used tasks with visual stimuli, whereas, fewer studies have examined attentional control in bilinguals in auditory tasks. The authors studied components of EF in two Go/No-Go auditory tasks with nonverbal auditory stimuli and verbal auditory stimuli in 5-year-old Spanish-English bilingual (n = 30) and English-speaking monolingual (n = 30) children matched on age, gender, short-term memory, and early reading skills. The Go/No-Go tasks were modeled after a continuous performance task and included additional blocks of trials to measure the effects of switching targets. The bilingual children made fewer errors and had shorter reaction times in the second block of the nonverbal auditory tasks than the monolinguals, but there were no differences on verbal auditory task. The results suggest that early bilingualism may confer advantages in young children for responding to nonverbal auditory stimuli under conditions that require cognitive flexibility.
Full Text
Headnote
Abstract
Previous studies have shown that bilinguals have greater control over attentional resources than monolinguals in nonverbal tasks, perhaps reflecting domain-general enhancements of executive functioning (EF). Most studies of this bilingual advantage have used tasks with visual stimuli whereas fewer studies have examined attentional control in bilinguals in auditory tasks. We studied components of EF in two Go/No-Go auditory tasks with (1) nonverbal auditory stimuli and (2) verbal auditory stimuli in 5-year-old Spanish-English bilingual (n = 30) and English-speaking monolingual (n = 30) children matched on age, gender, short-term memory (digits forward subtest), and early reading skills (phoneme awareness and letter naming). The Go/No-Go tasks were modeled after a continuous performance task (CPT) (Mahone, Pillion, & Hiemenz, 2001) and included additional blocks of trials to measure the effects of switching targets. The bilingual children made fewer errors and had shorter reaction times (RTs) in the second block of the nonverbal auditory tasks than the monolinguals, but there were no differences on the verbal auditory task. Our results suggest that early bilingualism may confer advantages in young children for responding to nonverbal auditory stimuli under conditions that require cognitive flexibility.
Keywords
Auditory, bilingual, cognitive control, executive function, nonverbal
Previous studies have shown that bilinguals have greater control over attentional resources than monolinguals in nonverbal tasks, perhaps reflecting domain-general enhancements of executive functioning (EF). Most studies of this bilingual advantage have used tasks with visual stimuli whereas fewer studies have examined attentional control in bilinguals in auditory tasks. We studied components of EF in two Go/No-Go auditory tasks with (1) nonverbal auditory stimuli and (2) verbal auditory stimuli in 5-year-old Spanish-English bilingual (n = 30) and English-speaking monolingual (n = 30) children matched on age, gender, short-term memory (digits forward subtest), and early reading skills (phoneme awareness and letter naming). The Go/No-Go tasks were modeled after a continuous performance task (CPT) (Mahone, Pillion, & Hiemenz, 2001) and included additional blocks of trials to measure the effects of switching targets. The bilingual children made fewer errors and had shorter reaction times (RTs) in the second block of the nonverbal auditory tasks than the monolinguals, but there were no differences on the verbal auditory task. Our results suggest that early bilingualism may confer advantages in young children for responding to nonverbal auditory stimuli under conditions that require cognitive flexibility.
Keywords
Auditory, bilingual, cognitive control, executive function, nonverbal
Executive function (EF) skills are closely linked to academic performance (Blair & Razza, 2007; Gathercole & Pickering, 2001; St. Clair-Thompson & Gathercole, 2006), and specifically to read- ing (e.g., Adams & Snowling, 2001; Sesma, Mahone, Levine, Eason, & Cutting, 2009; Stevens, Sanders, & Neville, 2006). These findings suggest that efforts to improve academic achievement in children at risk for academic failure might benefit from inclusion of EF interventions (Diamond & Lee, 2011). Thus an understanding of how EFs develop is a rich area of research with important applications.
Some experiences appear to promote early and stronger EF skills. These include cultural/parent- ing practices (Bernier, Carlson, Deschenes, & Matte-Gagne, 2012; Bull, Espy, Wiebe, Sheffield, & Nelson, 2011; Lan, Legare, Ponitz, Li, & Morrison, 2011) and early school experiences (Diamond, Barnett, Thomas, & Munro, 2007; Diamond & Lee, 2011) which afford a child with frequent oppor- tunities to practice cognitive control and intensive musical training (Bialystok & DePape, 2009). One of the most well-documented and well-understood sources of experiential effects on EF is bilingual- ism (e.g., Bialystok & Craik, 2010), the focus of the present study. Adult bilinguals show a consistent advantage in EF tasks that involve aspects of cognitive control (for a review see Bialystok & Craik, 2010), a finding that has consistently been replicated in child bilinguals (e.g., Bialystok, 2011; Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008; Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008). Recently, Barac and Bialystok (2012) have shown that the effects of bilingualism on EF skills are distinct from cultural influences in children.
A presumed mechanism underlying the bilingualism effects on EF is that the automatic activa- tion of both language repertoires (Colome, 2001; De Groot, Delmaar, & Lupker, 2000; Jared & Kroll, 2001; Rodriguez-Fornells, Rotte, Heinze, Nosselt, & Munte, 2002; Thierry & Wu, 2007) provides bilinguals with frequent experiences where they must inhibit responses and rapidly select and control attentional resources. The bilingual EF advantage has been observed most frequently in nonverbal tasks, however - a surprising finding given the verbal nature of the language experi- ences thought to underlie this effect. It has been hypothesized, therefore, that this advantage reflects a domain-general rather than a domain-specific enhancement (Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2012), perhaps associated with a fronto-parietal network which serves as a 'general switching mechanism' (Hervais-Adelman, Moser-Mercer, & Golestan, 2011).
The issue of domain-generality/specificity is critical to practitioners and researchers seeking to enhance EF skills as it directly addresses how generalizable these abilities are (Bonifacci, Giombini, Bellocchi, & Contento, 2011; Karbach & Kray, 2009; Thorell, Lindqvist, Nutley, Bohlin, & Klingberg, 2009). For example, if EF skills are domain-specific, one might expect poorer generali- zation of skills to non-trained domains, whereas if EF skills are domain-general, this might suggest greater generalizability to untrained domains.
Considerable evidence now suggests that verbal and nonverbal stimuli may be processed via different neural pathways (e.g., Binder et ah, 2000; Hickok & Poeppel, 2007), and yet executive function studies to date have tended to study EF skills in bilinguals primarily in tasks involving nonverbal stimuli in the visual modality. A recent meta-analysis suggests, however, that there may be important effects of type of task and processing demands on executive functions (Booth, 2010). For example, St. Clair-Thompson and Gathercole (2006) reported that verbal and nonverbal mem- ory skills associate with different academic domains (i.e., verbal memory with language, and non- verbal memory with math) and Sörqvist (2010) showed that nonverbal and verbal distractors may have different effects in various academic tasks. Previous studies of EF in bilinguals have tended to mix modalities and domain. Most of these studies have used tasks with visual stimuli; few stud- ies have examined the effect in auditory tasks. Thus the modularity of executive functions is not as well established in the literature as it may appear, suggesting that it may be fruitful to test the ver- bal/nonverbal distinction in auditory EF tasks with bilinguals.
The present study examined verbal and nonverbal EF functions in the auditory modality using Go/No-Go auditory tasks with environmental auditory sounds (nonverbal) and minimal pairs of speech sounds (verbal). This measure (Foy & Mann, 2012), adapted from a continuous perfor- mance task (CPT) which has been previously used with preschool children (the ACPT-P; Mahone, et al., 2001), uses similar tasks for verbal and nonverbal stimuli, allowing for a more direct com- parison of performance in these two domains, and provides measures arguably related to the three major components of EF skills (inhibition, working memory, and set shifting) (Banich, 2009; Friedman et ah, 2006; Miyake et ah, 2000).
In summary, the present study examined the effects of bilingualism on EF subcomponents in verbal and nonverbal auditory tasks. Consistent with previous findings of the bilingual advantage in nonverbal tasks, we expected to find that bilingual kindergarteners would show better performance compared to monolingual children in the nonverbal, but not the verbal auditory Go/No-Go task.
Method
Participants
The parents/caregivers of the child participants were contacted via the school/program administra- tor, telling parents and guardians about the purpose of and procedures to be used in the study, and asking them to sign a consent form on behalf of their children if they wished to be included in the study. Informed written consent procedures by the parent/caregiver and child oral assent were consistent with the guidelines of the American Psychological Association (APA). Children whose parents reported them as fluent or somewhat fluent in a language other than Spanish (n = 6) were not included in this study. Participants (M = 63.1 months, interquartile range = 58.9-66.61 months; 25 girls, 35 boys) consisted of 30 Spanish-English bilingual and 30 monolingual kinder- garten children and were all from low socioeconomic backgrounds. The participants were part of a larger study reported separately.
The children included 13 Caucasian (21.67%), 10 African American (16.67%), 27 Hispanic (45%), and five children of mixed racial heritage ( 8.33%). Five of the parents ( 8.33%) declined to respond regarding racial heritage. The sample was predominantly right-handed (93%). All of the bilingual children were fluent speakers of English. Early reading skills and control measures are summarized in Table 1.
All of the children had normal hearing and normal or corrected-to-normal vision as determined by independent testing organized by the school. None of the children included in the study were receiving special educational services, including speech therapy, through the school (i.e., did not have an active Individualized Education Plan) at the time of the study.
Spanish proficiency
We administered a Language Background Questionnaire to parents in their preferred language as part of the consent process for all children. This brief questionnaire regarding their children served as an initial screening for bilingualism. These consisted of the following questions:
(1) What other languages does s/he speak (if any)?
(2) Is your child fluent in this other language?
(3) When did your child begin to speak this other language?
Children of parents who reported that their child did not speak another language were classified as 'monolingual'. Children of parents who responded 'Yes' or 'Some' to whether their child was fluent in Spanish and who reported that the child had been exposed to Spanish since at least 12 months of age were then screened using the 10 questions from Part 2 of questions asked in Spanish from the Language Dominance Survey (Language Dominance Survey, EOWPVT-SBE: Brownell, 2001 ). Consistent with the protocol for this survey, the examiner used the child's responses to these questions to classify the child's degree of bilingualism as 'speaks Spanish exclusively at home and in school with minimal knowledge of English' (none in the present sample), 'speaks mostly Spanish, but also speaks some English' (one child), 'speaks both Spanish and English with equal ease' (eight children) or 'speaks mostly English but also speaks some Spanish' (21 children). Each bilingual child was matched with an English-speaking monolingual child on age, gender, maternal education (as a proxy measure for socio- economic status (SES)), short-term and working memory, and early reading skills.
Materials
Executive function. Children were given verbal and nonverbal computerized versions of a Continu- ous Performance Test previously shown to be sensitive to individual differences in EF in monolin- gual kindergarten-aged children (Foy & Mann, 2012). At the beginning of the first block for each task, the children were given six practice trials where they demonstrated their comprehension of the instructions by pressing the spacebar on a computer keyboard with their preferred hand for a target, and making no response for a distractor item. If the children failed to achieve criterion on the practice trials (5/6 correct), the practice trials were re-administered one time. Children who failed to achieve criterion on the second block of trials would have been excluded, but no children failed the practice blocks. The tasks were modeled after the Auditory Continuous Performance Test-Preschoolers (Mahone, et ah, 2001; Mahone, Pillion, Hoffman, Hiemenz, & Denckla, 2005), but also included an additional block of trials to measure the children's ability to shift their atten- tion, inhibit responses, and to switch responses from task to task. Each test (nonverbal and verbal) took five minutes to complete. Measures in each of the tasks (nonverbal and verbal EF) included average reaction time (RT) for correct responses, and rates of misses and false alarms in the first and second blocks. The second block of trials constituted the measures of switching ability: RTs and rates of misses and false alarms in the second block. Responses were scored as hits for pressing the spacebar for targets within 3200 ms, as false alarms for pressing the space bar for distractors within 3200 ms, as misses for failing to press the spacebar for targets within 3200 ms, and correct rejections as no depression of the spacebar within 3200 ms of the distractor presentation. RT was measured in milliseconds from the time of stimulus offset.
Nonverbal EF task. Mahone's original test consisted of a task where children were asked to respond to a target (barking dog) and to ignore a distractor (ringing bell) in two blocks where the target was infrequent relative to distractors (four targets, 11 distractors) and subsequently, where the target was frequent relative to distractors (11 targets, four distractors). As described in Foy and Mann (2012), the test replicated methods and materials used by Mahone and his colleagues (2001), including use of the same training and testing procedures and experimental parameters (including inter-stimulus interval (ISI) of 5000 ms), and added in a second block where the targets and distrac- tors were reversed in order to study the children's ability to switch responses from block to block. Thus, after a block of 30 trials (15 targets and 15 distractors), the target was then switched, so that the children then had to respond to the new target, which had previously been a distractor. Children were randomly assigned to orders of the tasks (dog target, bell target).
Verbal EF task. Approximately one month after completion of the nonverbal task, the children com- pleted the verbal version of the modified ACPT-P task. As described previously (Foy & Mann, 2012), the verbal test consisted of two randomized blocks with interchanged target and distractor verbal stimuli (/ba/ and /pa/), spoken by an adult female, digitized at 22.255 Hz, edited using Sound Studio 4.0.1 (http://sound-studio.en.softonic.com/), and saved in an 8-bit format.
Early reading skills
Letter knowledge. Letter-naming skills were assessed by asking the children to name letters presented in rows (untimed test), and organized by case in a Scrambled Letters test. The task assessed all upper (26) and lower case (28: includes 'a' and 'g' in both major font styles) letters in random order. Scores on the Letter Naming Fluency (LNF) subtest of the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills test (DIBELS) (Compton, 2006; Kaminski & Good, 1996) also served as a measure of letter knowl- edge. In the LNF task the children are asked to name letters arranged in random sequence; the number correctly identified in one minute yields the score. Children are not penalized for articulation errors on this task. A composite score was obtained by adding the LNF and letter names measures.
Phonological awareness. Syllable and phoneme segmenting and blending skills were assessed using the three subtests of the English Modified Rosner Test (EMRT; Berninger, Thalberg, DeBruyn, & Smith, 1987). In these three subtests the children are asked to remove (1) syllables, (2) singleton phonemes, and (3) phonemes in blends from familiar words. These tests ask the children to manipu- late phonemes heard in words by making a verbal response. The children's responses are transcribed and digitally recorded for later offline analysis. Each item is scored as correct or incorrect in relation to its target using specified guidelines. Scores on the Initial Sounds Fluency (ISF) subtest of the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills test (DIBELS) (Compton, 2006; Kaminski & Good, 1996) also served as a measure of phonological awareness. A composite score, Phonological Awareness Knowledge (PAK), was computed by summing the Rosner and ISF scores.
Reading. Word and nonword reading was measured with the Word Identification (real words) and Word Attack (pseudowords) subtests of Woodcock-Johnson (WJ) Reading Battery with reliability reported to range from .87 to .97 (Woodcock, 1987). The composite reading score (Reading) con- sisted of the summed scores for the word and nonword subtests.
Control variables
Verbal working memory. The digit span subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Sale for Children (Wechsler, 1992) was administered to assess verbal short-term and working memory. In this standardized, reliable and valid test, the examiner says single digits at the rate of one per second, and asks the participants to repeat them forwards (Digits-F) and backwards (Digits-B). Digits-B is a reliable measure of verbal working memory (Carroll, Snowling, Hulme, & Stevenson, 2003; Engel de Abreu, Conway, & Gathercole, 2010; Savage, Cornish, Manly, & Hollis, 2006), and has been shown to be a reliable predictor of reading performance (Gathercole & Pickering, 2001).
Expressive vocabulary. Children were tested using the Expressive One Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT-SBE: Brownell, 2001). Split-half reliability ranges from .84 (KR) at age two to .92 at age nine, with a median reliability coefficient of .90. The concurrent validity measures range yielded low-to-moderate correlations (ranging from .19 to .59).
Procedure
The children's early reading, vocabulary, and memory were tested individually in a quiet room at the beginning of the school year in two sessions lasting about 20-30 minutes each. The tests were admin- istered in random order. EF testing was conducted mid-year, beginning with the nonverbal tasks and followed by the verbal tasks approximately four weeks later. A fixed order was used for two reasons: (1) to reduce random noise that might have been introduced by randomizing order in the relatively small sample of participants and (2) to give the children practice with the easier (nonverbal) task first.
Results
Before analysis, the data were examined for missing values, fit between their distributions and the assumptions of multivariate analysis (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2001). Using a range of-1 to 1 as cutoffs for both skewness and kurtosis - a stringent test for the skew and kurtosis indices, accord- ing to Kline (1998) - we found that the early reading and RT measures were normally distributed. To correct for positive skewness and kurtosis in the miss and false alarm measures, however, we performed nonparametric statistics (Kruskal-Wallis and Spearman correlations) to examine post hoc relationships involving these variables. These tests are appropriate statistics to use when vari- ables have equivalent but non-normal distributions (Norusis, 2000). If the results were different using the nonparametric statistics we have reported those. All statistical analyses were two-tailed with alpha set to .05.
Bilingual group differences
The mean scores for each group appear in Table 2. Kruskal-Wallis analyses for each EF, reading- related and control variable revealed no statistically significant group differences between the lan- guage dominance groups. Thus their scores were collapsed into one bilingual group for comparison with the monolinguals.
Nonverbal tasks
Separate Block (Dog vs Bell) x Language (Monolingual vs Bilingual) x Order (Dog or Bell first) ANOVAs for misses, false alarms, and RT revealed significant interactions between these variables on the number of misses, F(1, 56) = 5.18, MSE = 4.032,p = .027 and RT, F(1, 56) = 4.46, MSE = 39221.14, p = .039. Interactions between block and language and order were not statistically sig- nificant for false alarms, F(1, 56) = 2.52, MSE = 4.099,p = .118.
Descriptive statistics for the monolingual and bilingual measures are shown in Table 3. Post hoc tests showed that monolinguals made significantly more misses, t(58) = 2.402, p = .02, d = .63, and had longer RTs than the bilinguals in the second block, t(58) = 2.109,y> = .039, d= .55. There were no significant differences between any of these variables in the first block.
As shown in Table 3, paired samples t-tests comparing performance in the first and second blocks separately for the monolinguals and bilinguals revealed that monolinguals made signifi- cantly more misses in the second block compared to the first block, t(29) = 2.076,p = .047, and had longer RTs in the second block compared to the first, t(29) = 2.202, p = .036. There were no signifi- cant differences between performance on the first and second blocks for any of the Go/No-Go measures in the nonverbal task for the bilinguals.
Verbal tasks
Separate Block (ba vs pa) X Language (Monolingual vs Bilingual) X Order (Ba or Pa first) ANOVAs for misses, false alarms and RT revealed a significant interaction between block and order onRT, F( l, 48) = 31.99, MSE = 28820.00,y> = .0001. Interactions for misses, F( l, 48) = .09, MSE = A6,p = .761, and false alarms F(1, 48) = .132, MSE = 1.03,= .72, were not statistically significant.
Descriptive statistics for the monolingual and bilingual measures are shown in Table 3. Post hoc tests revealed no significant differences between the monolinguals and bilinguals on any of the verbal EF measures. Paired samples Mests comparing performance in the first and second blocks separately for the monolinguals and bilinguals revealed that both monolinguals and bilinguals had longer RTs in the second compared to the first block, t(25) = 4.01, p = .0001 and t(25) = 4.30, p = .0001.
Discussion
In this study, we hypothesized that we would find a bilingual advantage in the nonverbal, but not the verbal auditory task. Given that bilingualism effects should be separated from cultural and socioeconomic factors (Barac & Bialystok, 2012; Morton & Harper, 2007), we used a fairly homogenous sample of monolingual and bilingual children drawn from the same geographic area, with the bilingual children all proficient in the same languages (English and Spanish). Consistent with previous studies that were largely conducted using visual stimuli (e.g., Yoshida, Tran, Benitez, & Kuwabara, 2011) we found that the advantage for bilinguals was only apparent in the nonverbal task. To our knowledge, our study is the first to directly compare verbal with nonverbal EF skills in similar tasks, and one of the few to investigate the bilingual advantage using auditory stimuli. Our results now add to a relatively large body of research showing that bilingual experiences ben- efit EF skills when stimuli are overtly nonverbal, and that this benefit contrasts with verbal stimuli, where no bilingual advantage was found.
Our finding that bilinguals show an advantage in EF tasks with nonverbal stimuli, but not with verbal stimuli, adds to a growing observation that bilingualism, while apparently associated with unique verbal experiences, appears to be associated with greater benefits in nonverbal tasks (Hernandez, Costa, & Humphreys, 2012; Kuo & Anderson, 2012; Yoshida, et ah, 2011). Whereas Hilchey and Klein (2011) raise the very important point that tasks that are overtly nonverbal may nonetheless be linguistically mediated, our results now add to the literature in showing that the bilingual advantage with overtly nonverbal auditory EF stimuli appears to be found where, in con- trast, there is no difference in overtly verbal auditory EF stimuli. This latter fact would seem to make a linguistically mediated strategy an untenable explanation of the bilingual advantage for nonverbal stimuli.
Current explanations for the finding of a bilingual advantage for nonverbal but not verbal stim- uli include proposing a 'general switching mechanism' (Hervais-Adelman, et ah, 2011), a 'com- mon network' (Abutalebi, Cappa, & Perani, 2001), or a 'general control system' (Luk, De Sa, & Bialystok, 2011). Our findings provide indirect support for a domain-general processing advan- tage. The tasks we used (after Foy & Mann, 2012) consisted of two blocks in which the same vari- ables (misses, false alarms, and RTs) are measured. In the second block, the target switching provides an opportunity to examine the effects of such switching on the same measures as exam- ined in the first block. Bilinguals and monolinguals showed similar RT and rates of misses and false alarms in the first block, for the nonverbal and verbal tasks. For the verbal task, the similari- ties between the groups persisted into the second block when the target was switched. The bilingual and monolingual children were similarly affected by the switching when the stimuli were verbal: they made more mistakes and had longer reaction times. However, when the stimuli were nonver- bal, the bilingual children had significantly fewer misses and faster RTs than the monolinguals, and appeared to be unaffected by the switching task when the stimuli were nonverbal. Our results provide evidence for a nonverbal advantage for bilinguals in switching attention from one target to another, but only in terms of maintaining the response in working memory (misses) and response speed (RT). Adding to the findings of other researchers (Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008; Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008), we did not find bilingual advantage effects for withholding responses in the second block (false alarms).
In our bilingual sample (five-year-old Spanish-English bilinguals who tended to be more profi- cient in L2 than L1), as with other adult and child bilingual samples, proficiency, as measured by the Language Dominance Survey, did not reveal significant differences. Other studies have shown effects of age (e.g., Luk, et ah, 2011) and degree of active bilingualism (Soveri, Rodriguez-Fornells, & Laine, 2011; Sugiura et ah, 2011), but our sample is small, young and most likely sufficiently homogenous to fail to show real differences in age or degree of active bilingualism. Our impression of this sample was that parents and teachers were actively discouraging expressive use of Spanish at school and that the children had internalized these values. Indeed, our examiners reported that the children would often converse freely in Spanish with the examiners until formal testing began, and then would refuse to respond in Spanish. In the future we recommend the use of a receptive measure of Spanish vocabulary to overcome these expressive biases, and perhaps to obtain a more reliable measure of degree of active bilingualism in the sample.
The finding of an advantage to a domain (nonverbal) presumably not directly affected by the verbal experiences thought to underlie the bilingual advantage provides support for the view that executive function skills associated with academic success may possibly be trained (Bonifacci, et ah, 2011; Diamond, et ah, 2007; Karbach & Kray, 2009; Thorell, et ah, 2009). Certain kinds of intensive experiences (Diamond & Lee, 2011) appear to hone these skills in ways that are similar to the effects we observe in bilingual children.
In conclusion, this study adds an important element to the literature on EF advantages in bilin- gual children. Although the general consensus is that such advantages involve nonverbal process- ing, to our knowledge, this hypothesis has not been explicitly tested with comparable verbal and nonverbal tasks in the auditory modality. Our results corroborate the finding that EF advantages are seen in nonverbal but not verbal tasks in the auditory modality. These findings provide indirect support for a domain-general mechanism being affected by early bilingual experiences in the audi- tory modality, as well as in the visual modality, as shown in previous studies.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
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Gathercole, S. E., & Pickering, S. J. (2001). Working memory deficits in children with special educational needs. British Journal of Special Education, 28, 89-97.
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Hickok, G., & Poeppel, D. (2007). The cortical organization of speech processing. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8, 393-402.
Hilchey, M. D., & Klein, R. M. (2011). Are there bilingual advantages on nonlinguistic interference tasks? Implications for the plasticity of executive control processes. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 18, 625-658.
Jared, D., & Kroll, J. F. (2001). Do bilinguals activate phonological representations in one or both of their languages when naming words? Journal of Memory and Language, 44, 2-31.
Kaminski, R., & Good, R. H. I. (1996). Toward a technology for assessing basic early literacy skills. School Psychology Review, 25(2), 215-227.
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Kuo, L.-J., & Anderson, R.C. (2012). Effects of early bilingualism on learning phonological regularities in a new language. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 111(3), 455-467.
Lan, X., Legare, C. H., Ponitz, C. C., Li, S., & Morrison, F. J. (2011). Investigating the links between the sub- components of executive function and academic achievement: A cross-cultural analysis of Chinese and American preschoolers. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 108, 677-692.
Luk, G., De Sa, E., & Bialystok, E. (2011). Is there a relation between onset age of bilingualism and enhance- ment of cognitive control? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14(4), 588-595.
Mahone, E. M., Pillion, J. R, & Hiemenz, J. R. (2001). Development of an auditory continuous performance test for preschoolers. Journal of Attention Disorders, 5, 93-106.
Mahone, E. M., Pillion, J. P., Hoffman, J., Hiemenz, J. R., & Denckla, M. B. (2005). Construct validity of the auditory continuous performance test for preschoolers. Developmental Neuropsychology, 27, 11-13.
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Miyake, A., Friedman, N. P., Emerson, M. J., Witzki, A. H., Howerter, A., & Wager, T. D. (2000). The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex 'frontal lobe' tasks: A latent vari- able analysis. Cognitive Psychology, 41(1), 49-100.
Morton, J. B., & Harper, S. N. (2007). What did Simon say? Revisiting the bilingual advantage. Developmental Science, 10, 719-726.
Norusis, M. J. (2000). Guide to data analysis. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Rodriguez-Fornells, A., Rotte, M., Heinze, H.-J., Nosselt, T. M., & Munte, T. F. (2002). Brain potential and functional MRI evidence for how to handle two languages with one brain. Nature, 415, 1026-1029.
Savage, R., Cornish, K., Manly, T., & Hollis, C. (2006). Cognitive processes in children's reading and attention: The role of working memory, divided attention, and response inhibition. British Journal of Psychology, 97, 365-385.
Sesma, H. W., Mahone, M., Levine, T., Eason, S. E., & Cutting, L. E. (2009). The contribution of executive skills to reading comprehension. Child Neuropsychology, 15(3), 232-246.
Sörqvist, P. (2010). Effects of aircraft noise and speech on prose memory: What role for working memory capacity? Journal of Environmental Psychology, 30(1), 112-118.
Soveri, A., Rodriguez-Fornells, A., & Laine, M. (2011). Is there a relationship between language switch- ing and executive functions in bilingualism? Introducing a within-group analysis approach. Frontiers in Psychology. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00183
St Clair-Thompson, H. L., & Gathercole, S. E. (2006). Executive functions and achievements in school: Shifting, updating, inhibition, and working memory. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 59(4), 745-759.
Stevens, C., Sanders, L., & Neville, H. (2006). Neurophysiological evidence for selective auditory attention deficits in children with specific language impairment. Brain Research, 1111(1), 143-152.
Sugiura, L., Ojima, S., Matsuba-Kurita, H., Dan, T., Tsuzuki, D., Katura, T., et al. (2011). Sound to language: Different cortical processing for first and second languages in elementary school children as revealed by large-scale study using fNIRS. Cerebral Cortex, 21, 2374-2393.
Tabachnick, B. G., & Fidell, L. S. (2001). Using multivariate statistics (4th ed.). New York: Harper Collins.
Thierry, G., & Wu, Y. J. (2007). Brain potentials reveal unconscious translation during foreign language comprehension. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104, 12530-12535.
Thorell, L. B., Lindqvist, S., Nutley, S. B., Bohlin, G., & Klingberg, T. (2009). Training and transfer effects of executive functions in preschool children. Developmental Science, 12(1), 106-113.
Wechsler, D. (1992). Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. London: Psychological Corporation.
Woodcock, R. M. (1987). Woodcock Reading Mastery - Revised, Form H. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service.
Yoshida, H., Tran, D. C., Benitez, V., & Kuwabara, M. (2011). Inhibition and adjective learning in bilingual and monolingual children. Frontiers in Psychology, 2. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00210
AuthorAffiliation
Judith G. Foy
Loyola Marymount University, USA
Virginia A. Mann
University of California, USA
Corresponding author:
Judith G. Foy, Department of Psychology, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA 90045, USA.
Email: jfoy@lmu.edu
Author biographies
Judith G. Foy is a Speech-Language Pathologist and Professor of Psychology at Loyola Marymount University, where she founded and directs an early intervention program for children at risk for reading problems. Her research focuses on factors that influence reading and speech and language development.
Virginia A. Mann holds an S.B. and a Ph.D. from MIT and is a Professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. She conducts research on written and spoken language development, is the campus director ofUCI's Jumpstart program, and is part of the software development team that created the Fast ForWord Reading series.
Loyola Marymount University, USA
Virginia A. Mann
University of California, USA
Corresponding author:
Judith G. Foy, Department of Psychology, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA 90045, USA.
Email: jfoy@lmu.edu
Author biographies
Judith G. Foy is a Speech-Language Pathologist and Professor of Psychology at Loyola Marymount University, where she founded and directs an early intervention program for children at risk for reading problems. Her research focuses on factors that influence reading and speech and language development.
Virginia A. Mann holds an S.B. and a Ph.D. from MIT and is a Professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. She conducts research on written and spoken language development, is the campus director ofUCI's Jumpstart program, and is part of the software development team that created the Fast ForWord Reading series.
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Copyright Sage Publications Ltd. Dec 2014
