Cultural Effects Rather Than a Bilingual Advantage in Cognition: A Review and an Empirical Study

Abstract

The bilingual advantage hypothesis contends that the management of two languages in the brain is carried out through domain-general mechanisms, and that bilinguals possess a performance advantage over monolinguals on (nonlinguistic) tasks that tap these processes. Presently, there is evidence both for and against such an advantage. Interestingly, the evidence in favor has been thought strongest in children and older adults, leading some researchers to argue that young adults might be at peak performance levels, and therefore bilingualism is unable to confer an improvement. We conducted a large-scale review of the extant literature and found that the weight of research pointed to an absence of positive evidence for a bilingual advantage at any age. We next gave a large number of young adult participants a task designed to test the bilingual advantage hypothesis. Reasoning from the literature that young adults from an East Asian (Korean) culture would likely outperform those from a Western (British) culture, we also compared participants on this factor. We found no evidence for a bilingual advantage but did find evidence for enhanced performance in the Korean group. We interpret these results as further evidence against the bilingual advantage hypotheses.

Does the Bilingual Advantage in Cognitive Control Exist and if so, what are Its Modulating Factors? A Systematic Review

“…Regarding the second question about the modulating factors of the bilingual advantage in cognitive control, in the literature [45], the interplay between the bilingual management demand and the level of experience the individual has with managing those demands seem to affect the bilingual advantage (Figure 4). Moreover, socioeconomic status [30], ethnicity [30], cultural factors [30,79], processing demand [58], script similarity of the investigated languages [47] and language environment [48] were found to be important modulating factors of the bilingual advantage in cognitive control. In future research, the use of Ex-Gaussian Distribution Analysis [106] in original studies and meta-analyses seems to be a promising approach to investigating better the factors modulating the bilingual advantage in cognitive control.…”

“…Of the 56, 46 were original studies [7,14,21,, and 10 were review/meta-analysis studies [70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79]. The bilingual studies were conducted on several continents, with 23 (41.1%) having been conducted in North America (particularly in Canada) [14, 21, 27, 29-32, 34, 38, 45, 48, 53-55, 60, 63, 69-72, 74, 75, 78], 5 (8.9%) having been conducted by a North American/European collaboration [36,42,47,50,58], 2 (3.6%) having been conducted by a North American/Asian collaboration [54,61], 1 (1.8%) having been conducted by a North American/European/Asian collaboration [28], 18 (32.1%) having been European studies [33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 46, 49, 51, 52, 57, 64, 66-68, 73, 76, 77], 1 (1.8%) having been conducted by an European/Australian collaboration [40], 2 (3.6%) having been conducted by an European/Asian collaboration [7,79], and 4 (7.1%) having been Asian studies [44,59,61,65]. To date, of 28 African or Latin American studies on bilingualism and cognitive control still have not been published.…”

“…The current study draws attention to several important limitations of previous bilingual studies that are important to take into account if progress in the research on the bilingual advantage in cognitive control is to be made. For instance, in the research on the bilingual advantage in cognitive control so far, socioeconomic status [30], ethnicity [30], cultural factors [30,79], script similarity of the investigated languages [47], and L2 experience and history [107] seem to be important factors that need to be controlled. For instance, children with less intellectual stimulation during infancy might benefit more in cognitive control from language switching practice than bilingual children with more intellectual stimulation.…”

Individual Variation and the Bilingual Advantage - Factors that Modulate the Effect of Bilingualism on Cognitive Control and Cognitive Reserve

“…The aim of this special issue is to provide an overview of studies published so far on bilingualism and cognitive control, as well as their findings, in an effort to determine whether or not a bilingual advantage in cognitive control really exists. Furthermore, the focus will be on individual, as well as methodological, factors such as socioeconomic status [11], immigrant status and ethnicity [12], cognitive capacity [13], culture [14], age [15], and experimental task used [15], all factors that might modulate the bilingual advantage in cognitive control. Finally, we will take a closer look at the cognitive reserve hypothesis [16] that states that individuals with more cognitive reserve have a reduced risk of suffering from brain diseases, such as dementia [17].…”

Individual Variation and the Bilingual Advantage—Factors that Modulate the Effect of Bilingualism on Cognitive Control and Cognitive Reserve

“…The aim of this special issue is to provide an overview of studies published so far on bilingualism and cognitive control, as well as their findings, in an effort to determine whether or not a bilingual advantage in cognitive control really exists. Furthermore, the focus will be on individual, as well as methodological, factors such as socioeconomic status [11], immigrant status and ethnicity [12], cognitive capacity [13], culture [14], age [15], and experimental task used [15], all factors that might modulate the bilingual advantage in cognitive control. Finally, we will take a closer look at the cognitive reserve hypothesis [16] that states that individuals with more cognitive reserve have a reduced risk of suffering from brain diseases, such as dementia [17].…”