There is considerable debate about whether bilingual children have an advantage in executive functioning relative to monolingual children. In the current meta-analysis, we addressed this debate by comprehensively reviewing the available evidence. We synthesized data from published studies and unpublished data sets, which equated to 1,194 effect sizes from 10,937 bilingual and 12,477 monolingual participants between the ages of 3 and 17 years. Bilingual language status had a small overall effect on children’s executive functioning (g = .08, 95% confidence interval = [.01, .14]). However, the effect of language status on children’s executive functioning was indistinguishable from zero (g = −.04) after we adjusted for publication bias. Further, no significant effects were apparent within the executive-attention domain, in which the effects of language status have been hypothesized to be most pronounced (g = .06, 95% confidence interval = [−.02, .14]). Taken together, available evidence suggests that the bilingual advantage in children’s executive functioning is small, variable, and potentially not attributable to the effect of language status.

关于双语儿童相对于单语儿童在执行功能方面是否具有优势存在相当多的争论。在当前的荟萃分析中，我们通过全面审查现有证据来解决这一争论。我们综合了已发表的研究和未发表的数据集的数据，相当于来自 10,937 名双语和 12,477 名年龄在 3 岁至 17 岁之间的单语参与者的 1,194 个效应量。双语语言状态对儿童执行功能的整体影响较小（ g = .08，95% 置信区间 = [.01, .14]）。然而，在我们调整发表偏倚后，语言状态对儿童执行功能的影响几乎为零（ g = -.04）。此外，在执行注意力领域没有明显的影响，其中语言状态的影响被假设为最明显（ g = .06，95％置信区间= [−.02，.14]）。总而言之，现有证据表明，儿童执行功能中的双语优势很小、可变，并且可能无法归因于语言状态的影响。