Highlights-Language switching is directly related to executive control advantages -Frequent language switchers are better at processing conflicting information -L2 proficiency plays a much smaller role 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 AbstractIn an ongoing debate, bilingual research currently discusses whether bilingualism enhances non-linguistic executive control. The goal of this study was to investigate the influence of language switching experience, rather than language proficiency, on this bilingual executive control advantage. We compared the performance of unbalanced bilinguals, balanced non-switching, and balanced switching bilinguals on two executive control tasks, i.e. a flanker and a Simon task. We found that the balanced switching bilinguals outperformed both other groups in terms of executive control performance, whereas the unbalanced and balanced non-switching bilinguals did not differ. These findings indicate that language switching experience, rather than high second-language proficiency, is the key determinant of the bilingual advantage in cognitive control processes related to interference resolution.

At disease onset, patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) typically report one side of the body to be more affected than the other. Previous studies have reported that this motor symptom asymmetry is associated with asymmetric dopaminergic degeneration in the brain. Research on the cognitive repercussions of this asymmetric degeneration has yielded inconsistent results. Here, we review studies that reported on the cognitive performance of patients with left-sided (LPD) or right-sided (RPD) motor symptom predominance. We present evidence that patients with RPD typically experience problems with language-related tasks and verbal memory, whereas patients with LPD more often perform worse on tasks of spatial attention, visuospatial orienting and memory and mental imagery. In general, no differences were found between both groups on tasks measuring attention and executive function. The association between motor asymmetry and cognitive performance indicates that PD does not lead to one typical cognitive profile. The effect of symptom laterality on the cognitive complaints should be considered in the assessment and treatment of each individual patient.

We describe a case study of a French-Dutch bilingual patient with differential aphasia, showing clearly larger impairments in Dutch than in French. We investigated whether this differential impairment in both languages was due to selective damage to language-specific brain areas resulting in the "loss" of the language representation itself, or rather if it reflects an executive control deficit. We assessed cross-linguistic interactions (involving lexical activation in the most affected language) with cognates in a lexical decision (LD) task, and executive control using a flanker task. We used a generalized LD task (any word requires a "yes" response) and a selective LD task in the patient's two languages (only words in a given target language require a "yes" response). The cognate data unveil a differential pattern in the three tasks, with a clear cognate facilitation effect in the generalized LD tasks and almost no cognate effect in the selective LD tasks. This implies that a more impaired language can still affect the processing of words in the best-preserved language, but only with low cross-language competition demands (generalized LD). Additionally, the flanker task showed a larger congruency effect for the patient compared with controls, indicating cognitive control difficulties. Together, these results support accounts of differential bilingual aphasia in terms of language-control difficulties.

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The present data indicate preserved language co-activation for patients with parallel as well as differential aphasia. Furthermore, the results suggest a general cognitive control dysfunction, specifically for differential aphasia. Taken together, the results of the current study provide further support for the hypothesis of impaired cognitive control abilities in patients with differential aphasia, which has both theoretical and practical implications.

In this reply to Kroll, Van Hell, Tokowicz and Green ( No one doubts the huge contribution the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) has made to research on bilingualism. When it was published in 1994, it provided a much-needed synthesis of how the bilingual memory was organized and the way in which it functioned. As such, it offered researchers a framework to formulate new questions. The model also stayed close enough to people's intuitions to have immediate appeal. Indeed, every time we taught the model, we saw the students nod in agreement: this is how bilingualism SHOULD work. So, there was no doubt in our minds that RHM had to be the guide when we started our bilingual research in the late 1990s. And, truth be told, the model has been very rewarding to us, as it has been to many others. However, theoretical inspiration was not met with an equal amount of clarity, as the model mainly generated hypotheses that had to be rejected after empirical testing (at least for our type of bilinguals). Although this was gratifying in the spirit of scientific progress through falsification, after ten years of research we saw ourselves confronted with the question of whether we still thought that the model could serve as a roadmap for new students and practitioners. How many times must a theory fail the test before it becomes discredited? 1 Address for correspondence: Marc Brysbaert, Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, B-9000 Gent, Belgium. Tel: +32 9 264 94 25. Fax: +32 9 264 64 96. marc.brysbaert@ugent.be 1 Popper changed his mind about this question during his career.Originally he thought researchers should give up a theory right away after the first falsification. Later he acknowledged that such an attitude would have left us with very few scientific theories and he even advised theorists to be dogmatic: "If we give in to criticism too easily, we shall never find out where the real power of our theories lies" (Popper, 1970, p. 55).Because we agree with Kroll et al. that divergent results provide an opportunity for theoretical advancement, we considered it time to look back at the field's main source of inspiration, pinpointing those hypotheses that need refinement and those that do not. Within this spirit, we hope our critical review article, together with Kroll et al.'s reply, will benefit the field. By making unresolved controversies more explicit, we hope our joint effort will improve the field's orientation and guide it to new, fruitful research questions. We are grateful to Kroll et al. for their reply and the counterweight they offer to our reservations.Kroll et al. are right that our analysis focused on word perception, as this is the field where the RHM has inspired our own research the most. However, it was with some surprise that we read we may have misunderstood the RHM in this respect, because "the RHM is fundamentally a model of word production" (pp. 000). This brings us to the wider issue of how the RHM has been used by researchers. Were we the only ones failing to und...

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