Bilinguals and Reading Comprehension

Reading Comprehension in Bilingual subjects seems to be less efficient than in Monolingual peers, with consequences that lead to early school dropout. The literature offers an important contribution regarding the Reading Comprehension of Monolinguals, which would be influenced by the Executive Functions and Working Memory of the subjects. As regards Bilinguals, the literature looks more at a linguistic component as a factor underlying Reading Comprehension. The aim of this meta-analysis was to identify which functions are mostly responsible for the Reading Comprehension performance of Bilingual subjects. For this purpose, 13 articles were selected that compared the Reading Comprehension performance of Monolingual and Bilingual subjects, coding in addition to the Reading Comprehension variable, two reading variables and one vocabulary variable. The following were calculated: effect size of each variable to measure the difference between Monolinguals and Bilinguals. The results of our meta-analysis highlight that reading skills (both lexical and phonological) do not seem to influence the performance in Reading Comprehension of Bilingual subjects. Subsequently, a meta-regression was conducted to verify the presence of an influence of vocabulary on Reading Comprehension tasks. Our results show that the size of the L2 Vocabulary of Bilingual subjects influences their performance in Reading Comprehension.