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      Is there a bilingual advantage in the ANT task? Evidence from children

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          Abstract

          Bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals in a variety of tasks that do not tap into linguistic processes. The origin of this bilingual advantage has been questioned in recent years. While some authors argue that the reason behind this apparent advantage is bilinguals' enhanced executive functioning, inhibitory skills and/or monitoring abilities, other authors suggest that the locus of these differences between bilinguals and monolinguals may lie in uncontrolled factors or incorrectly matched samples. In the current study we tested a group of 180 bilingual children and a group of 180 carefully matched monolinguals in a child-friendly version of the ANT task. Following recent evidence from similar studies with children, our results showed no bilingual advantage at all, given that the performance of the two groups in the task and the indices associated with the individual attention networks were highly similar and statistically indistinguishable.

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          Most cited references29

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          The activation of attentional networks.

          Alerting, orienting, and executive control are widely thought to be relatively independent aspects of attention that are linked to separable brain regions. However, neuroimaging studies have yet to examine evidence for the anatomical separability of these three aspects of attention in the same subjects performing the same task. The attention network test (ANT) examines the effects of cues and targets within a single reaction time task to provide a means of exploring the efficiency of the alerting, orienting, and executive control networks involved in attention. It also provides an opportunity to examine the brain activity of these three networks as they operate in a single integrated task. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the brain areas involved in the three attention systems targeted by the ANT. The alerting contrast showed strong thalamic involvement and activation of anterior and posterior cortical sites. As expected, the orienting contrast activated parietal sites and frontal eye fields. The executive control network contrast showed activation of the anterior cingulate along with several other brain areas. With some exceptions, activation patterns of these three networks within this single task are consistent with previous fMRI studies that have been studied in separate tasks. Overall, the fMRI results suggest that the functional contrasts within this single task differentially activate three separable anatomical networks related to the components of attention.
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            Bayesian estimation supersedes the t test.

            Bayesian estimation for 2 groups provides complete distributions of credible values for the effect size, group means and their difference, standard deviations and their difference, and the normality of the data. The method handles outliers. The decision rule can accept the null value (unlike traditional t tests) when certainty in the estimate is high (unlike Bayesian model comparison using Bayes factors). The method also yields precise estimates of statistical power for various research goals. The software and programs are free and run on Macintosh, Windows, and Linux platforms. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.
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              Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: evidence from the Simon task.

              Previous work has shown that bilingualism is associated with more effective controlled processing in children; the assumption is that the constant management of 2 competing languages enhances executive functions (E. Bialystok, 2001). The present research attempted to determine whether this bilingual advantage persists for adults and whether bilingualism attenuates the negative effects of aging on cognitive control in older adults. Three studies are reported that compared the performance of monolingual and bilingual middle-aged and older adults on the Simon task. Bilingualism was associated with smaller Simon effect costs for both age groups; bilingual participants also responded more rapidly to conditions that placed greater demands on working memory. In all cases the bilingual advantage was greater for older participants. It appears, therefore, that controlled processing is carried out more effectively by bilinguals and that bilingualism helps to offset age-related losses in certain executive processes. ((c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                07 May 2014
                2014
                : 5
                : 398
                Affiliations
                [1] 1Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain
                [2] 2Departamento de Psicología Cognitiva, Social y Organizacional, Faculty of Psychology, University of La Laguna La Laguna, Spain
                [3] 3Departamento de Psicobiología y Metodología de las Ciencias del Comportamiento, Faculty of Psychology, University of La Laguna La Laguna, Spain
                [4] 4Departamento de Psicología Básica y Metodología, Faculty of Psychology, University of Murcia Murcia, Spain
                [5] 5University of Granada Granada, Spain
                [6] 6Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science Bilbao, Spain
                [7] 7Departamento de Lengua Vasca y Comunicación, University of the Basque Country EHU/UPV Bilbao, Spain
                Author notes

                Edited by: Simona Amenta, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

                Reviewed by: Petar Milin, Eberhardt Karls University, Germany; Kenneth Robert Paap, San Francisco State University, USA

                *Correspondence: Eneko Antón, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi 69-2, 20009, Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain e-mail: e.anton@ 123456bcbl.eu

                This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00398
                4019868
                24847298
                33691fdf-4f92-4b8d-931b-0b4b36fb3126
                Copyright © 2014 Antón, Duñabeitia, Estévez, Hernández, Castillo, Fuentes, Davidson and Carreiras.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 26 February 2014
                : 15 April 2014
                Page count
                Figures: 3, Tables: 4, Equations: 0, References: 47, Pages: 12, Words: 9781
                Categories
                Psychology
                Original Research Article

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                bilingual advantage,inhibitory skills,executive control,attention,ant task

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