DISTRIBUTED AND SELECTIVE ATTENTION IN BILINGUAL AND MONOLINGUAL PRESCHOOL-AGED CHILDREN

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of early bilingualism on selective and distributed auditory attention in preschool-aged children. Using an online, asynchronous preferential-looking paradigm, 48 children (24 bilingual, 24 monolingual), aged 2.98-4.89 years, were presented with trials in which two speakers simultaneously named familiar objects. Selective attention was measured by children’s fixation on targets named by the primary speaker, while distributed attention was measured by recall of targets previously named by the secondary speaker. Contrary to the hypothesis, no significant effect of language group was observed in either task. While children showed a weak significant effect of looking at target objects vs. distractor objects in selective attention trials, no group differences emerged, and performance in distributed attention tasks was near chance for both groups. Importantly, variability in bilingual participants’ language dominance, as reported through measures of children’s language experience, suggests group comparisons may obscure individual differences in bilingual experience. The absence of robust bilingual advantages in attention may also reflect limitations in task design, particularly for measuring distributed attention in young children in remote testing environments. These findings highlight the complexity of measuring bilingualism in early childhood and call attention to structural barriers that limit representation of non-English dominant families in developmental research. Future research should employ more refined measures of bilingual experience and address environmental and methodological constraints in remote child language studies.