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. 2014 May 26:5:485.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00485. eCollection 2014.

Never too late? An advantage on tests of auditory attention extends to late bilinguals

Thomas H Bak  1 , Mariana Vega-Mendoza  1 , Antonella Sorace  2
Affiliations

Never too late? An advantage on tests of auditory attention extends to late bilinguals

Thomas H Bak et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Recent studies, using predominantly visual tasks, indicate that early bilinguals tend to outperform monolinguals on attention tests. It remains less clear whether such advantages extend to those bilinguals who have acquired their second language later in life. We examined this question in 38 monolingual and 60 bilingual university students. The bilingual group was further subdivided into early childhood (ECB), late childhood (LCB), and early adulthood bilinguals (EAB). The assessment consisted of five subtests from the clinically validated Test of Everyday Attention (TEA). Overall, bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on auditory attention tests, but not on visual search tasks. The latter observation suggests that the differences between bilinguals and monolinguals are specific and not due to a generally higher cognitive performance in bilinguals. Within the bilingual group, ECB showed a larger advantage on attention switching, LCB/EAB on selective attention. We conclude that the effects of bilingualism extend into the auditory domain and are not confined to childhood bilinguals, although their scope might be slightly different in early and late bilinguals.

Keywords: age of acquisition; attention; auditory attention; bilingualism; cognition.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Difference between the monolingual and childhood bilingual groups on TEA sub-tests (Experiment 1).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Differences between the monolingual, the early, and the late childhood bilingual groups on TEA sub-tests (Experiment 1).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Differences between the monolingual and early adulthood bilingual groups on TEA sub-tests (Experiment 2).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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