On the time course of exogenous cueing effects in bilinguals: Higher proficiency in a second language is associated with more rapid endogenous disengagement

Abstract

Previous investigations have demonstrated a bilingual advantage on various aspects of executive control. It remains unclear how the language proficiency of bilinguals might relate to the mechanisms involved in attentional disengagement. In the present investigation, we tested the hypothesis that high bilingual proficiency would lead to a more rapid endogenous disengagement of attention from task-irrelevant peripheral cues. We predicted that more rapid attentional disengagement would result in an earlier appearance of inhibition of return (IOR). In this study Hindi-English bilinguals who differed in their L2 (English) proficiency participated in a target detection task. Visual targets were preceded by uninformative peripheral cues at various stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) allowing for us to visualize the time course of cue-related facilitation and inhibition. High-proficient Hindi-English bilinguals showed an earlier appearance of IOR than did low-proficient bilinguals, suggesting increased efficiency in disengagement of attention from task-irrelevant inputs. Furthermore, consistent with the "global" advantage that characterizes bilinguals in many tasks, the high-proficient group outperformed low-proficient bilinguals in overall reaction time.

Sequential congruency effects reveal differences in disengagement of attention for monolingual and bilingual young adults

“…Rapid disengagement is one of the mechanisms believed to be responsible for reduced switch costs (Allport & Wylie, 2000), although the finding of reduced switch costs for bilinguals is not always replicated (Hernández, Martin, Barceló, & Costa, 2013). Using an inhibition of return paradigm, Mishra and colleagues (2012) showed that high proficiency bilinguals showed the inhibition of return effect at earlier stimulus-onset-asynchronies than low proficiency bilinguals, a pattern consistent with more rapid disengagement from the preceding irrelevant distractor (Klein, 2000). Thus, higher proficiency in a second language is associated with more rapid disengagement.…”

“…There is some existing evidence that bilinguals disengage from previous distracting information more rapidly than monolinguals (Grundy & Keyvani Chahi, 2017; Mishra, Hilchey, Singh, & Klein, 2012). Task-switching studies that examine the cost of switching from one task to another versus repeating the same task have shown that bilinguals show smaller switch costs than monolinguals (Prior & Gollan, 2011; Prior & MacWhinney, 2010).…”

Auditory word recognition across the lifespan

“…In monolinguals, a delayed response on the 500ms probe indicated residual inhibition of the previous competitor. Critically, in bilinguals (but not monolinguals), better nonlinguistic Stroop performance was associated with shorter response times to the competitor priming probe, suggesting faster resolution of linguistic competition (Blumenfeld & Marian, 2011; for similar findings in the nonlinguistic domain, see Mishra, Hilchey, Singh, & Klein, 2012). Similar patterns have recently been identified linking quicker cross-linguistic competition resolution to better nonlinguistic Stroop performance in bilinguals (e.g., Blumenfeld & Marian, 2013; Mercier et al, 2014).…”

Data trimming procedure can eliminate bilingual cognitive advantage

“…Such heterogeneity in linguistic experiences has been shown to have led to diverse cognitive consequences, such as level of language proficiency (e.g. Mishra, Hilchey, Singh, & Klein, 2012), stage of second language acquisition (early bilingual vs. late bilingual, Kalia, Wilbourn, & Ghio, 2014), the degree of bilingualism (dominant vs. balanced bilingual, Goral, Campanelli, & Spiro, 2015), pattern of language use, varying experience with frequent language switch (Soveri, Rodriguez-Fornells, & Laine, 2011), the similarity between a bilingual speakers' two languages (Coderre & van Heuven, 2014, but see Paap et al, 2015a) and multilingualism (Poarch & van Hell, 2012). In addition, there are factors that are closely related to bilingualism or factors that drive the different language experiences, which at the same time are related to general cognitive performances.…”