The Bilingual Advantage in Children’s Executive Functioning Is Not Related to Language Status: A Meta-Analytic Review
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is considerable debate about whether bilingual children have an advantage in executive functioning relative to monolingual children. In the current meta-analysis, we addressed this debate by comprehensively reviewing the available evidence. We synthesized data from published studies and unpublished data sets, which equated to 1,194 effect sizes from 10,937 bilingual and 12,477 monolingual participants between the ages of 3 and 17 years. Bilingual language status had a small overall effect on children’s executive functioning ( g = .08, 95% confidence interval = [.01, .14]). However, the effect of language status on children’s executive functioning was indistinguishable from zero ( g = −.04) after we adjusted for publication bias. Further, no significant effects were apparent within the executive-attention domain, in which the effects of language status have been hypothesized to be most pronounced ( g = .06, 95% confidence interval = [−.02, .14]). Taken together, available evidence suggests that the bilingual advantage in children’s executive functioning is small, variable, and potentially not attributable to the effect of language status.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it