Enhanced Reading Skills are Associated with Auditory Spatial Attentional Rebalance Induced by the Exposure to Dual-language Contexts

ABSTRACT

Purpose

Research on the effects on early bilingualism on reading development is scarce. Here, we tackle this question by investigating whether the exposure to dual-language contexts (use of two languages in the same conversational situation) induces a boost in phonological and reading performance through more balanced spatial auditory attentional skills.

Method

Thirty Grade 1 early Spanish-Basque bilingual children predominantly exposed to dual-language contexts and 30 matched Spanish-Basque bilingual children predominantly exposed to single-language contexts were assessed on a dichotic listening task: syllables were simultaneously presented to the left and right ears and children were instructed to report the syllable they heard best.

Results

The dual-language contexts group demonstrated a reduced right ear advantage than the single-language contexts group, suggesting a more balanced report of syllables across ears in the former group. Moreover, more balanced reports were associated with more efficient reading skills.

Conclusions

These results suggest that the frequent exposure to dual-language contexts possibly triggers the spatial rebalance of attentional resources for speech processing, impacting positively the development of reading skills. Future studies will determine whether some bilingual experience might act as a protective factor to reduce the prevalence and severity of future reading impairments such as dyslexia.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the children and their families for their participants to our study and Mamen Gonzalez, Olatz Unceta and Paula Castellanos for data collection and preprocessing. The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest related to the research, design, or interpretation of the data presented in this study. This study was supported by the Ministerio de Economía, Industría y Competitividad (FPI grant BES-2016-078125 to J. P-N.; Plan Nacional grants RTI2018-096242-B-I00 and PRP-PID2022-136989OB-100 to M. L.; Ramon Y Cajal fellowship RYC-2015-17356 to M.L.); M.L and J.P-N acknowledge financial support from the Spanish State Research Agency, through the “Severo Ocho” Programme for Centers of Excellence in R&D CEX2020-001010/AEI10.13039/501100011033. M.O. was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) individual grant CEECIND/03483/2021.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Note that using GPower (Faul et al., 2007), post hoc statistical power analyses (i.e., 1 – beta error probability) for our significant effects based on effect sizes led to power values ranging between 0.80 and 0.99 except from the main effect of Group associated with 0.55 power. In addition, our sample size (n = 30 per group) was set to match a previous study using the same dichotic listening paradigm in children tested longitudinally between 5 and 8 years old. (Westerhausen et al., 2010; n = 35). and that detected significant effects of a similar magnitude.

2. Post hoc power calculation for significant correlations gave acceptable power ranging between .75 and .97.

Additional information

Funding

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Open Science Network at https://osf.io/q6yj8/.