The Influence of Second Language (L2) Proficiency on Cognitive Control Among Young Adult Unbalanced Chinese-English Bilinguals

Abstract

The current study investigates the influence of L2 proficiency on cognitive control among three matched groups of unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals. Flanker task was administered to measure conflict monitoring and inhibition, and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) to measure mental set shifting. ANOVA analyses of the Flanker results showed no differences in inhibition across all groups and no interaction between group and condition. However, the Flanker results showed faster performance for the highest L2 proficiency group relative to the lowest L2 proficiency group in all conditions (incongruent, neutral, and congruent), which reflects better ability of conflict monitoring. Finally, ANOVA analyses of the WCST results showed no differences across all groups. These results altogether suggest that L2 proficiency has significant influence on cognitive control, but only in conflict monitoring, not in inhibition or mental set shifting.

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

“…On the one hand, Yudes and colleagues [41] found that interpreters outperformed unbalanced-late bilinguals and monolinguals, which is what one would expect based on the bilingual advantage hypothesis. On the other hand, Xie [65] found no differences in scores between the high proficiency, the middle proficiency, and the low proficiency bilingual groups; similar results were found by Kousaie and colleagues [48], who also found no group differences between bilinguals and monolinguals. Van der Linden and colleagues [68], found no evidence in favor of a bilingual advantage on the N-back task and the Hebb repetition paradigm.…”

“…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.…”

“…Xie [65] looked more closely at the level of L2 proficiency. The degree of L2 proficiency affected conflict monitoring, but not inhibition or mental set shifting.…”

Bilingualism, Demographics, and Cognitive Control: A Within-Group Approach

“…In a more recent study by Xie (2018), it was shown that among the three bilingual groups varying in L2 proficiency, the high L2 proficiency bilingual group performed faster than the low L2 proficiency bilingual group in congruent, neutral, and incongruent trials, which further proves that bilingualism is significantly related to response times, which presumably reflects conflict monitoring. However, the regression analyses results of the current study showed no relation between bilingualism and mental set shifting.…”

Individual Differences In Bilingual Experience Modulate Executive Control Network And Performance: Behavioral And Structural Neuroimaging Evidence

“…Thus, as a result of increased control demand, high-proficient bilinguals would develop a better ability to resolve conflict. At the same time, behavioral bilingualism studies have produced a number of inconsistent outcomes, even when deploying continuous measures of BEFs, with studies failing to firmly establish an effect of L2 proficiency on executive performance, either partially (i.e., in one of several executive tasks) or completely (e.g., Becker, Schubert, Strobach, Gallinat & Kühn, 2016;Dong & Xie, 2014;Rosselli, Ardila, Lalwani & Vélez-Uribe, 2016;Xie, 2018). Dong and Xie (2014), for instance, found no effect of varying L2 proficiency on the level of performance on the same Flanker task deployed in the present study.…”