Selective attention in bilingual students: a comparison of skills in both languages

This study examined the selective attention skills of 37 kindergarten, first, and second graders enrolled in a bilingual immersion program. Bilingual children have demonstrated an advantage over monolingual children on tests of selective attention, but research has not compared selective attention skills in a bilinguals two languages. A dichotic listening task was used to assess selective attention in Spanish and English. Selective attention was evaluated by measuring shadowing fluency and story comprehension. Participants were better able to shadow stories presented in their first language (L1) than their second (L2). Participants also demonstrated greater story comprehension in their L1 than their L2. These results were taken to suggest that selective attention may develop differently in a bilinguals two languages and could be mediated by language proficiency