Despite much research examining whether bilingual individuals demonstrate superior executive function (EF) skills compared to monolinguals, the purported bilingual advantage remains controversial (e.g., Bialystok, 2017; Paap et al., 2015). One potential reason for discrepant findings across studies examining the bilingual advantage is the difficulty in matching monolingual and bilingual groups on important confounding variables that are related to EF. To address this limitation of prior research, we used a propensity score matching approach to evaluate the presence of the bilingual advantage in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Cohort of 2011. Consistent with recent theories of EF development (Doebel, 2020), we hypothesized that before matching, we would observe bilingual advantages on report- but not performance-based measures of EF. However, we expected that after matching bilingual and monolingual children on a comprehensive set of covariates there would be no group differences in EF. We matched bilingual Spanish-English and monolingual English kindergarteners on a comprehensive set of child- and school-level covariates, and conducted a sensitivity analysis to evaluate whether results were sensitive to unobserved confounds. After matching groups (n = 252 matched pairs of monolingual and bilingual children), bilinguals had greater teacher-rated inhibitory control and attentional focus than did monolinguals; however, only the effect for inhibitory control was robust to unobserved confounds. In contrast, no effects of bilingualism were observed for performance-based measures of working memory or cognitive flexibility. Results are discussed in the context of recent theoretical models of EF development in early childhood (Doebel, 2020).
Do Bilingual Children Have an Executive Function Advantage? Results From Inhibition, Shifting, and Updating Tasks
