Bilingual children show an advantage in controlling verbal interference during spoken language comprehension

• Published in: Bilingualism (Cambridge, England) Vol. 18; no. 3; pp. 490 - 501
• Main Authors: Filippi, Roberto, Morris, John, Richardson, Fiona M, Bright, Peter, Thomas, Michael S C, Karmiloff-Smith, Annette, Marian, Viorica
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Cambridge University Press 01.07.2015
• Subjects: Adults; Advantages; Bilingualism; Brain research; Children; Cognitive ability; Cognitive Development; Competition; Comprehension; English language; Language; Language Acquisition; Learning transfer; Linguistic interference; Linguistics; Medical imaging; Monolingualism; Noise; Second language learning; Sentence structure; Spoken language; Studies; Syntactic complexity; Young Children; spoken language processing; control of interference; sentence comprehension; inhibitory control; bilingualism; executive function
• ISSN: 1366-7289; 1469-1841
• DOI: 10.1017/S1366728914000686

Studies measuring inhibitory control in the visual modality have shown a bilingual advantage in both children and adults. However, there is a lack of developmental research on inhibitory control in the auditory modality. This study compared the comprehension of active and passive English sentences in 7-10 years old bilingual and monolingual children. The task was to identify the agent of a sentence in the presence of verbal interference. The target sentence was cued by the gender of the speaker. Children were instructed to focus on the sentence in the target voice and ignore the distractor sentence. Results indicate that bilinguals are more accurate than monolinguals in comprehending syntactically complex sentences in the presence of linguistic noise. This supports previous findings with adult participants (Filippi, Leech, Thomas, Green & Dick, 2012). We therefore conclude that the bilingual advantage in interference control begins early in life and is maintained throughout development.