Abstract
Attempts have been made to examine the interaction between attention ability and bilingualism. This project explored whether differences in executive attention abilities could predict the level of multilingual competence in children. The degree of multilingual competence was expected to be mirrored by measured differences on attentional mechanisms. It was hypothesised that increased multilingual instruction would enhance the general expertise in monitoring environmental stimuli and in ignoring irrelevant information. The research could classify correctly the great majority of cases as belonging to classes with a higher amount of L2 instruction. The subjects immersed in classes with larger amounts of L2 instruction were more likely to significantly exhibit a higher drift rate for congruent trials and performed better than the subjects that belonged to classes with fewer hours in L2. It was suggested that school programmes focus on improving children’s attentional mechanisms in order to enhance their linguistic competence.