Bilingualism and the Development of Executive Function: The Role of Attention

Abstract In this article, I review research examining the effect of bilingualism on children's cognitive development and in particular, executive function. I describe studies reporting bilingual advantages in various tasks to identify the process or component of executive function that might be responsible for this bilingual advantage, discussing several possibilities, including inhibitory control. Finally, I propose attention is a fundamental process that initiates developmental differences in bilingual children from as early as infancy.