The relationship between bilingualism and selective attention in young adults: Evidence from an ambiguous figures task

ABSTRACT

Previous research has shown that bilinguals outperform monolinguals on a variety of tasks that have been described as involving executive functioning, but the precise mechanism for those effects or a clear definition for “executive function” is unknown. This uncertainty has led to a number of studies for which no performance difference between monolingual and bilingual adults has been detected. One approach to clarifying these issues comes from research with children showing that bilinguals were more able than their monolingual peers to perceive both interpretations of an ambiguous figure, an ability that is more tied to a conception of selective attention than to specific components of executive function. The present study extends this notion to adults by assessing their ability to see the alternative image in an ambiguous figure. Bilinguals performed this task more efficiently than monolinguals by requiring fewer cues to identify the second image. This finding has implications for the role of selective attention in performance differences between monolinguals and bilinguals.

KEYWORDS:

• Ambiguous figures
• Bilingualism
• Executive function
• Selective attention

Acknowledgements

We thank Ashley Etherington, Natasha Goel, and Michelle Goodman for their assistance with the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All analyses were also run without these 10 participants but the pattern of results did not change, so we chose to report the data for the entire sample to keep the group numbers more comparable.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [grant number A2559] to E.B.