On March 3, 2022,
Wenfu Bao presented Standardized measures of auditory attention in monolingual and bilingual children.
The Zoom link for the meeting is here. The password was distributed through the mailing list.
Abstract
Bilinguals outperform monolinguals on various cognitive tasks, which is often interpreted as a bilingual advantage. Primarily based on findings from (audio-)visual attention tasks, it is hypothesized that this between-group difference might stem from their different attention allocation strategies. Yet, little is known about whether such distinction exists in the auditory domain alone, despite the importance of auditory attention to early language development. In this talk, I will present a systematic review and meta-analysis that assess if there are reliable differences between monolingual and bilingual children across typically/atypically developing populations in auditory attention, as measured by standardized tests. A comprehensive literature search was conducted in three electronic databases: OVID Medline, OVID PsycInfo and EBSCO CINAHL. Only empirical studies reporting standardized measures of auditory attention in monolingual and bilingual participants below 18 years were included. Results suggest little difference between the two groups in their performance on standardized auditory attention tests. Whether the lack of "bilingual advantage" observed here is related to the potentially wide variety of bilingual children included across studies and/or the standardized tests being developed for monolingual English-speaking populations only will be discussed.