It has been claimed that bilingualism enhances inhibitory control, but the available evidence is equivocal. The authors evaluated several possible versions of the inhibition hypothesis by comparing monolinguals and bilinguals with regard to stop signal performance, inhibition of return, and the attentional blink. These three phenomena, it can be argued, tap into different aspects of inhibition. Monolinguals and bilinguals did not differ in stop signal reaction time and thus were comparable in terms of active-inhibitory efficiency. However, bilinguals showed no facilitation from spatial cues, showed a strong inhibition of return effect, and exhibited a more pronounced attentional blink. These results suggest that bilinguals do not differ from monolinguals in terms of active inhibition but have acquired a better ability to maintain action goals and to use them to bias goal-related information. Under some circumstances, this ability may indirectly lead to more pronounced reactive inhibition of irrelevant information.

This study aimed to explore non-verbal executive processes in simultaneous interpreters. Simultaneous interpreters, bilinguals without any training in simultaneous interpreting, and control monolinguals performed the Wisconsin card sorting task (WCST; Experiment 1) and the Simon task (Experiment 2). Performance on WCST was thought to index cognitive flexibility while Simon task performance was considered an index of inhibitory processes. Simultaneous interpreters outperformed bilinguals and monolinguals on the WCST by showing reduced number of attempts to infer the rule, few errors, and few previous-category perseverations. However, simultaneous interpreters presented Simon effects similar to those found in bilinguals and monolinguals. Together, these results suggest that experience in interpreting is associated with changes in control processes required to perform interpreting tasks.

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Retrieving information from long-term memory can lead people to forget previously irrelevant related information. Some researchers have proposed that this retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) effect is mediated by inhibitory executive-control mechanisms recruited to overcome interference. We assessed whether inhibition in RIF depends on executive processes. The RIF effect observed in a standard retrieval-practice condition was compared to that observed in two different conditions in which participants had to perform two concurrent updating tasks that demanded executive attention. Whereas the usual RIF effect was observed when retrieval practice was performed singly, no evidence of forgetting was found in the dual-task conditions. Results strongly suggest that inhibition involved in RIF is the result of executive-control processes.

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This study examined the asymmetrical language switching cost in a word reading task (Experiment 1) and in a categorization task (Experiment 2 and 3). In Experiment 1, Spanish–English bilinguals named words in first language (L1) and second language (L2) in a switching paradigm. They were slower to switch from their weaker L2 to their more dominant L1 than from L1 to L2. In Experiment 2 and 3, high vs. low English proficiency bilinguals decided whether a word visually presented in their L1 or L2 referred to an animate or to an inanimate entity. In this case, bilinguals did not show asymmetrical cost when they switched between languages. These results suggest that inhibitory processes in bilingual processing as indexed by the asymmetrical language switching cost are only observed when L1 and L2 lexical representations compete for selection (e.g. word naming task). In addition, L2 proficiency did not influence the absence of asymmetrical switching cost.

Proficient bilinguals use two languages actively, but the contexts in which they do so may differ dramatically. The present study asked what consequences the contexts of language use hold for the way in which cognitive resources modulate language abilities. Three groups of speakers were compared, all of whom were highly proficient Spanish–English bilinguals who differed with respect to the contexts in which they used the two languages in their everyday lives. They performed two lexical production tasks and the “AX” variant of the Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT), a nonlinguistic measure of cognitive control. Results showed that lexical access in each language, and how it related to cognitive control ability, depended on whether bilinguals used their languages separately or interchangeably or whether they were immersed in their second language. These findings suggest that even highly proficient bilinguals who speak the same languages are not necessarily alike in the way in which they engage cognitive resources. Findings support recent proposals that being bilingual does not, in itself, identify a unique pattern of cognitive control. An important implication is that much of the controversy that currently surrounds the consequences of bilingualism may be understood, in part, as a failure to characterize the complexity associated with the context of language use.