Bilingualism
How do culture and language shape a child's attention?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Growing up in a collectivistic culture influences both alerting and executive attention, while being bilingual specifically boosts executive control.
Key findings
The study revealed that children from collectivistic cultural backgrounds performed better in alerting and executive control attention networks. Being bilingual provided a unique performance boost specifically in the executive control network, but had no significant impact on alerting. The orienting network was unaffected by either language status or cultural background.
Methodology
Researchers tracked 97 children starting at 3 years of age across five developmental sessions, with each session spaced 6 months apart, in three countries: the United States, Argentina, and Vietnam. The children were divided into monolingual and bilingual groups. They were tested on three attentional networks—alerting, orienting, and executive control—using a touchscreen task.
Limitations
The researchers could not recruit bilingual children in Argentina who matched the socio-economic status and language environments of the other groups, leaving Latin-influenced bilingualism unstudied. Because there was no standardized Vietnamese vocabulary test available, the researchers had to adapt a checklist from Chinese and Japanese versions, which may not perfectly reflect language abilities. Finally, the study groups entire countries into broad cultural categories, which overlooks significant internal diversity within those societies.
How this study connects
Role on claims
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Growing up in a collectivistic cultural background is associated with enhanced development in specific attentional networks, particularly alerting and executive control, in early childhood.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
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