Study of Attentional Networks of Alert, Orientation and Executive Control in Bilingual and Monolingual Primary School Children: The Role of Socioeconomic Status

For decades, researchers have suggested the existence of a bilingual cognitive advantage, especially in tasks involving executive functions such as inhibition, shifting, and updating. Recently an increasing number of studies have questioned whether or not bilingualism results in a change in executive functions based on conflicted data reported in the literature. This study compared the performance of third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade bilingual and monolingual children on attentional and cognitive tasks. The participants were 61 monolingual and 74 bilingual children (M:114,6 months; S.D.: 8,48 months). Participants were tested on two versions of the attention task (ANT), with and without social stimuli, and in some tests investigating working memory and receptive vocabulary tests. Additionally, we examined the sociocultural status and the reasoning abilities of the participants' families. The results show how bilingualism and the sociocultural index affect attentional networks when the task uses social stimuli or has no social value. When the task implies non-social stimuli, only the sociocultural index shows a difference between groups in the executive conflict network. Examining the relationships between the different variables that we considered, it is possible to note a positive relationship between the sociocultural index and executive control with social stimuli and a negative relationship between the alert network with non-social stimuli, both already documented in the literature (Schibli et al.., 2017). Interestingly, neither the sociocultural index nor the social attentional networks correlate with working memory functioning. Therefore, even if more investigations are required, the differences in social contexts mainly affect attentional functions.