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The relation between bilingualism and cognition is informative about the connection between language and mind. From the perspective of language, the question is how bilingualism might help or hinder cognition -narrowly interpreted here as executive function. From the perspective of higher cognition, the question is what kinds of experiences improve executive function. Reported cognitive benefits from bilingualism range from none to substantial as a function of age, type of bilingualism (e.g., life-long balanced vs later-onset or infrequent use of the other language), syntactic relation between the two languages, socio-economic and immigrant status, task, and laboratory. To understand the variability and inconsistencies in results with bilingualism, I analyze concepts of executive function and cognitive reserve and examine the range of factors (such as active video game playing, education, musical training, and aerobic exercise) that are known to correlate with or to improve executive function. I suggest that a) "executive function" is a complex set of cognitive processes, the components of which are sometimes minimally correlated with each other, depending on the task; b) bilingualism is inconsistently correlated with superior executive function and delayed onset of dementia; c) all speakers (mono-or bilingual) have non-linguistic ways of improving executive function; and d) benefits from bilingualism -and all cognitively challenging activities -are inconsistent because individuals vary in the number and kinds of experiences they have that promote superior executive function.Keywords: bilingualism and executive function, bilingualism and dementia, improving executive function, improving aging I am indebted to a very large number of people, at least some of whom may agree with at least some of my conclusions. The list includes colleagues who made detailed comments on earlier versions of the paper, individuals who helpfully provided insights into their own research and perspectives during discussions, and those who commented on presentations of this work at the CUNY Graduate

We use syntactic priming to test the abstractness of the sentence representations of young 3-year-olds (35-42 months). In describing pictures with inanimate participants, 18 children primed with passives produced more passives (11 with a strict scoring scheme, 16 with lax scoring) than did 18 children primed with actives (2 on either scheme) or 12 children who received no priming (0). Priming was comparable to that reported for older children and adults. Comprehension of reversible passives with animate participants before and after priming was above chance but did not improve as a result of priming. Young 3-year-olds represent sentences abstractly, have syntactic representations for noun, verb, ''surface subject", and ''surface object", have semantic representations for ''agent" and ''patient", and flexibly map the relation between syntax and semantics. Taken together with research on syntactic categories in 2-year-olds, our results provide empirical support for continuity in language acquisition.