Are there bilingual advantages on nonlinguistic interference tasks? Implications for the plasticity of executive control processes

Abstract

It has been proposed that the unique need for early bilinguals to manage multiple languages while their executive control mechanisms are developing might result in long-term cognitive advantages on inhibitory control processes that generalize beyond the language domain. We review the empirical data from the literature on nonlinguistic interference tasks to assess the validity of this proposed bilingual inhibitory control advantage. Our review of these findings reveals that the bilingual advantage on conflict resolution, which by hypothesis is mediated by inhibitory control, is sporadic at best, and in some cases conspicuously absent. A robust finding from this review is that bilinguals typically outperform monolinguals on both compatible and incompatible trials, often by similar magnitudes. Together, these findings suggest that bilinguals do enjoy a more widespread cognitive advantage (a bilingual executive processing advantage) that is likely observable on a variety of cognitive assessment tools but that, somewhat ironically, is most often not apparent on traditional assays of nonlinguistic inhibitory control processes.

Enhancing the learning of new words using an errorless learning procedure: Evidence from typical adults

“…Furthermore, Gathercole et al (2014) found no evidence of a bilingual advantage in children, adolescents (13-16 years) and adults (18-90 years) (see also Paap & Greenberg, 2013 for the Flanker task). In a recent review Hilchey and Klein (2011) found that although bilinguals tended to perform faster than monolinguals, the congruency effect was of similar magnitude. This led them to conclude that bilinguals "enjoy a general processing advantage that can be detected early developmentally and that persists throughout life… [but] places the locus of control not on inhibitory processes per se, but on a central executive system that has some capacity to regulate processing across a wide variety of task demands" (p., 654).…”

Identifying a Threshold for the Executive Function Advantage in Bilingual Children

“…It has been claimed that the bilingual advantage in inhibitory control is particularly elusive in young children (Hilchey & Klein, 2011). In their meta-analysis of 39 studies, Donnelly, Brooks, and Homer (2015) ascertained the existence of a moderate but statistically significant bilingual advantage overall on global reaction time and interference costs from conflict resolution tasks.…”

“…Socio-economic status (SES) might have acted as a confound in some studies (as suggested by Hilchey & Klein, 2011). Socially advantaged 4-to 7-year-old children have been shown to perform faster than their age-matched peers in terms of accuracy and speed in a flanker task (Mezzacappa, 2004), and parental level of education has been shown to predict children's development of executive functions (Ardila, Rosselli, Matute, & Guajardo, 2005;Merz et al, 2015).…”

“…This EF component has received the most attention in the literature on bilingualism (see Hilchey & Klein, 2011 for an in-depth, critical review). This was sparked by a seminal paper by Green (1998), which argued that language control in bilinguals resembles the control of action and proposed the Inhibition Control model to account for the control of language in bilinguals specifically.…”

The Role and Sources of Individual Differences in Critical-Analytic Thinking: a Capsule Overview

“…Bilinguals exhibit differential neural activation particularly in the bilateral prefrontal cortex, ACC, and striatum (Petitto and Dunbar 2009;Rodríguez-Pujadas et al 2014). However, there has been much debate over whether these findings are specific to language or domain-general (Hilchey and Klein 2011). The impact of bilingualism on critical-analytic thinking is unknown.…”