Do Bilinguals Outperform Monolinguals in Switching Tasks? Contrary Evidence for Nonlinguistic and Linguistic Switching Tasks

Abstract

The benefits of bilingualism in executive functions are highly debated. Even so, in switching tasks, these effects seem robust, although smaller than initially thought (Gunnerud et al., 2020; Ware et al., 2020). By handling two languages throughout their lifespan, bilinguals appear to train their executive functions and show benefits in nonlinguistic switching tasks compared to monolinguals. Nevertheless, because bilinguals need to control for the interference of another language, they may show a disadvantage when dealing with task-switching paradigms requiring language control, particularly when those are performed in their less dominant language. The present work explored this issue by studying bilingualism’s effects on task-switching within the visual and language domains. On the one hand, our results show that bilinguals were overall faster and presented reduced switch costs compared to monolinguals when performing perceptual geometric judgments with no time for task preparation. On the other hand, no bilingual advantage was found when a new sample of comparable bilinguals and monolinguals completed a within-language switching task. Our results provide clear evidence favoring the bilingual advantage, yet only when the task imposes greater executive demands and does not involve language control.

Cognitive Flexibility and Stability at the Task-Set Level: A Dual-Dimension Framework

“…In a similar vein, school classes taught in two languages predicted decreased switch costs, but no change on congruency effects (Christoffels et al, 2015). Although cognitive advantages of bilingualism are inconsistent and contested (Dick et al, 2019;Mas-Herrero et al, 2021;Paap et al, 2017;Sanchez-Azanza et al, 2017), in this particular study, students enrolled in bilingual classes produced smaller switch costs compared to those instructed in only one language. While switch costs differed as a function of bilingual education, the congruency effect did not.…”