The Bivalent Shape Task:

• Includes both congruent and incongruent test items

• Perceptually distracting stimuli (color)

• Mixed block presentation (incongruent and congruent are in a set random order)

• Does not require reading or number knowledge

• Is not dependent on word knowledge.

• Manual response on touch screen

• Bivalent (meaning it has distracting perceptual information as well as perceptual features relevant to the required

response)

• Runs on free access software: Psychology Experiment Building Language (PEBL; Mueller, 2011, 2010)

Where is the Bilingual Advantage in

Preschoolers' Stroop Task Performance?

Select References Bunge, A. S., Dudukovic, N. M., Thomason, M. E., Vaidya, C. J., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2002). Immature Frontal Lobe Contributions

to Cognitive Control in Children: Evidence from fMRI. Neuron, 33(2), 301-311. ISSN 0896-6273, 10.1016/S0896-

6273(01)00583-9.

Esposito, A. G., Baker-Ward, L., and Mueller, S. T. (2013). Interference Suppression vs. Response Inhibition: Preschoolers

Demonstrate a Bilingual Advantage with a New Stroop Task. Cognitive Development 28, 354-363. doi:

10.1016/j.cogdev.2013.09.002.

Gerstadt, L., Hong, Y. J., & Diamond, A. (1994). The relationship between cognition and action : performance of children 3 ½-7

years old on a Stroop-like day-night test. Cognition, 53(2), 129–153.

Martin-Rhee, M. M., & Bialystok, E. (2008). The development of two types of inhibitory control in monolingual and bilingual

children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11(01), 81–93. doi:10.1017/S1366728907003227

Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18(6), 643-662. doi:

10.1037/h0054651

Alena G. Esposito

Psychology

Inhibition and the Bilingual Advantage

• Bilingual advantage

• Mulitilingual compared to monolingual individuals perform better on tasks

of controlled attention (Adesope et al., 2010).

• Found in Stroop Tasks with adults, such as the classic Stroop, but not in preschool children tested with

age appropriate variants, such as the Day/Night task (Hernández et al., 2010; Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008).

• WHY? Possibly the distinction between interference suppression and response inhibition.

• The bilingual advantage is found when tasks involve choosing between two viable perceptual stimuli:

interference suppression (Bunge et al., 2008)

• Example: Classic Color Word Stroop task, pictured above, in which color words are printed in an ink color

that is incongruent to the word such as the word “blue” printed in red ink (Stroop, 1935).

• In contrast, response inhibition is the inhibition of a dominant or prepotent response.

• Example: Day/Night task, pictured above, in which children respond to a picture of the sun with the word

“night” and the moon with the word “day” (Gerstadt et al., 1994).

• Interference suppression resembles the everyday experience of being bilingual (Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008).

• Bilingual advantages are found in Stroop tasks with conflicting perceptual stimuli, but not in tasks typically used with

preschoolers.

• Do preschoolers fail to show the bilingual advantage with Stroop tasks because the adapted tasks involve

response inhibition rather than interference suppression?

The Need for a New Conflict Task

• The Bivalent Shape Task was created to measure interference suppression in bilingual and monolingual preschool

age children.

• Children are directed to match the target shape to one of two active buttons at the bottom of the screen. The

perceptually distracting color can be either congruent or incongruent.

Participants

Hypotheses We expected:

1. No difference between language groups in Day/Night task performance.

2. Monolingual preschoolers would have a larger Stroop Effect (in the form of greater

incongruent than congruent errors) compared to bilingual preschoolers in the Bivalent

Shape Task.

3. The bilingual children would have significantly better performance in the form of fewer

incongruent errors compared to monolingual children on the Bivalent Shape Task, but

the children would not differ in errors on congruent trials.

Procedure

Results

Preliminary: There were no effects of task order, gender, or vocabulary. The groups did not differ in vocabulary. Vocabulary

was not a significant predictor of outcome variables, and hence was not included in further models. There were no group

differences in age, but because age predicted performance it was included as a covariate in subsequent MANCOVA analyses.

Day/Night task: As predicted, there were no language group differences in either Stroop Effect or trial accuracy.

Bivalent Shape task: Monolingual preschoolers had significantly better performance on congruent compared to incongruent

trials (Stroop Effect). However, bilingual preschoolers did not show a Stroop Effect. In addition, there were no accuracy

differences between bilingual and monolingual preschoolers on congruent trials, but bilingual preschoolers were significantly

more accurate on incongruent trials compared to monolingual preschoolers.

.

Discussion and Conclusions

• Results support a bilingual advantage in interference suppression (BST) but not response inhibition (Day/Night)

• The BST, like the Dimensional Change Card Sort (Zelazo, 2006), documents a preschool advantage (e.g., Bialystok & Martin,

2004). Both tasks require the children to sort bivalent stimuli, but the BST found a bilingual advantage in the absence

of the switching component. Results indicate that stimulus bivalence is important n invoking the bilingual advantage

in conflict tasks.

• The BST offers an alternative to the currently-available Stroop tasks. The Day/Night task measure of inhibition does

not appear to be measuring the same construct as the Classic Color/Word Stroop. Few bivalent tasks offer both

congruent and incongruent trials for comparison and those that do exist require rapid picture naming, putting

bilingual children at a possible disadvantage.

• The BST also has the possible advantage of use across the lifespan. In ongoing research with college students,

reaction times differ between congruent and incongruent trials (the Stroop effect), and reaction times on the BST and

on the Classic Color/Word Stroop are correlated.

Color/Shape Task

Congruent Incongruent

Participants

Bilingual Monolingual

Total n 26 25

Female 16 12

Mean months of age (SD) 49.8 (7.5) 50.1 (8.6)

OR OR

Vocabulary

fluency

+

Sp

an

ish

fo

r F

un

Pre

sch

oo

l, C

ary

NC

Classic Stroop Day/Night Coding