Meta-analysis of the effect of bilingualism on executive functions in causal-comparative research

Authors
Morteza Omidian
Khadije Kheneyfar
Gholamhossein Maktabi
Manije Sheheni Yeylagh
Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Ahvaz, Iran
Abstract


Considering the claims of bilingualism theories and their effect on executive functions, this research was conducted with the meta-analysis method in order to investigate the effect of bilingualism on executive functions. The purpose of this research was to combine the researches done in the field of executive functions. In this research, meta-analysis was used as a tool to determine, collect, combine and summarize research findings related to the effect of bilingualism on executive functions. For this purpose, articles published between 2000 and 2023 were reviewed and 436 researches were found, of which 30 researches were included in the meta-analysis based on the research criteria (causal-comparative research method, having a experimental and control group, and descriptive statistics). The number of subjects in the whole research was 1412 people. The findings of the research showed that the overall effect size of the studied research was 0.633 (p<0.001) for the fixed effects model and 0.771 (p<0.001) for the random effects model, which is significant for both and it shows that bilingualism has an effect on executive functions.




Keywords
bilingualism
Executive Functions
Meta-analysis
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