Growing Up with Three Languages: A Review of Multilingualism, Attention and Executive Function in Teenagers: A Critical Literature Review

Naddar Kaur

Vol. 22, Issue 1, Jul-Dec 2026

Abstract:

I grew up speaking Hindi and Punjabi at home and English at school in Delhi, and I now study in English in New Jersey. For years, a well-known line of research reported that bilingual people have better attention and executive control, while more recent work has asked whether that advantage is real, small or a product of how studies were run. This critical literature review asked whether the advantage appears in adolescents, how studies define bilingualism, and how authors explain their disagreements. Searches run on 25 October 2026 identified 39 records, and 15 were kept for a study table: nine primary studies and six reviews or very large studies. The only experiment limited to teenagers found that 32 bilingual students responded faster than 33 monolingual students on one attention task but not on harder versions (Chung-Fat-Yim et al., 2019). In contrast, the largest U.S. samples found no advantage once family income and parents' education were taken into account, including a 2026 analysis of more than 10,000 young adolescents in which apparent differences between bilingual groups disappeared after controlling for socioeconomic status. Meta-analyses of children and adolescents estimated the overall effect at g = 0.06 and g = 0.08, falling to -0.04 after adjusting for publication bias. Across the studies, larger and better-matched samples found smaller differences, and differences linked to how bilingualism was defined largely followed family socioeconomic status. Teenagers who speak three languages were almost never studied, and the main systematic review of children and adolescents excluded multilingual participants. The current evidence does not support a general executive-function advantage for bilingual or multilingual teenagers, although a small, task-specific effect in some groups cannot be ruled out.

DOI: http://doi.org/10.37648/ijrmst.v22i01.004

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