Language proficiency, sociolinguistic factors and inhibitory control among bilinguals

Introduction to the special issue on cognitive consequences of bilingualism

“…Bhandari et al (2020) present evidence that bilinguals, particularly those who are high proficient in their second language, bring in higher executive control when the context becomes demanding. Thanissery et al (2020) similarly find that high proficient bilinguals perform better on inhibitory control tasks replicating many previous findings of Mishra (2012, 2013) on Hindi English bilinguals using behavioural tasks. Arora and Klein (2020) conducted a meta-analysis comparing monolinguals and bilinguals on the attention network task (ANT), a task which Albert Costa had used in his pioneering work.…”

Bilinguals on the footbridge: the role of foreign-language proficiency in moral decision making

“…L2p may affect bilinguals' inhibitory control. In this sense, L2p is related positively with better inhibitory control in response to L2 stimuli, as seen in studies using the Simon task (Goral et al, 2015 ), the Stroop task (Hui et al, 2020 ) and other standard go/no-go inhibition tasks (Thanissery et al, 2020 ), likely because bilinguals have to develop stronger cognitive control systems as they process L2 stimuli more efficiently when they can inhibit and break away from L1 lexical schemas (Grant et al, 2019 ). Since prepotent response suppression seems critical to process stimuli that provoke stronger preferences for deontological inaction, like personal moral dilemmas (Amit & Greene, 2012 ; McDonald et al, 2017 ), a lower L2p could entail less inhibitory control on personal moral dilemmas, thus reducing affective and cognitive action deterrents and increasing utilitarian decisions.…”

“…Regardless of its measurement, this variable is known to modulate diverse cognitive domains. As such, higher L2p levels have been linked to heightened emotional processing (activation of affective mechanisms by arousing stimuli; Caldwell-Harris, 2015 ; Harris et al, 2006 ; Imbault et al, 2021 ; Pavlenko, 2017 ; Sutton et al, 2007 ), enriched mental imagery (visual or otherwise perceptual representations of events in the absence of direct sensory input; Hayakawa & Keysar, 2018 ), increased inhibitory control (the capacity to suppress prepotent information to favor adequate task completion; Goral et al, 2015 ; Hui et al, 2020 ; Thanissery et al, 2020 ), more efficient lexico-semantic processing (access to and retrieval of words' meanings; Abutalebi, 2008 ; Bialystok & Craik, 2010 ; Cuppini et al, 2013 ; Dijkstra et al, 2019 ; Ibáñez et al, 2010 ; Keating, 2017 ; Liberto et al, 2021 ; Zheng et al, 2020 ), stronger embodied resonance (reactivation of sensorimotor brain mechanisms subserving the bodily experiences denoted by linguistic material; Bergen et al, 2010 ; Birba et al, 2020 ; Ibáñez et al, 2010 ; Kogan et al, 2020 ; Vukovic, 2013 ), enhanced code switching flexibility (alternation between languages during continuous speech; Kootstra et al, 2012 ) and better numerical processing (the ability to perform mental operations involving digits and figures; Hoshino et al, 2010 ; Van Rinsveld et al, 2016 ). Higher L2p also impacts complex social phenomena, as it is related to more effective lying and lie detection (Caldwell-Harris & Ayçiçeǧi-Dinn, 2009 ; Elliott & Leach, 2016 ), increased prosocial sentiments (Miller et al, 2021 ), greater altruism (Liu et al, 2022 ) and enhanced theory of mind capabilities (Nguyen & Astington, 2014 ).…”

“…L2p may impact the MFLE by modulating these processes. Indeed, during L2 tasks, low L2p reduces the vividness and sensorimotor reactivations of mental scenes (Altın et al, 2022 ; Birba et al, 2020 ), hampers inhibitory reactions (Hui et al, 2020 ; Thanissery et al, 2020 ), lessens prosocial and empathic tendencies (Dewaele & Wei, 2012 ; Ferré et al, 2022 ) and limits numerical processing capacities (Garcia et al, 2021 ; Van Rinsveld et al, 2016 ). Accordingly, L2p could partly account for the heterogeneous results around the MFLE.…”

The Complexity in Bilingual Code-Switching Research: A Systematic Review

“…Thirteen studies utilized objective measures of language variables (Barbu et al 2018(Barbu et al , 2020Beatty-Martínez et al 2020;Carter et al 2023;Grundy et al 2020;Han et al 2022;Kałamała et al 2020;Keijzer and Schmid 2016;Kheder and Kaan 2021;Lai and O'Brien 2020;Rodriguez-Fornells et al 2012;Thanissery et al 2020;Xie 2014). Studies that chose to use objective language measures typically did so to measure specific aspects of language use that self-assessment alone cannot gather, such as vocabulary, phonological, or grammatical knowledge (Treffers-Daller 2018).…”