In recent decades several authors have suggested that bilinguals exhibit enhanced cognitive control as compared to monolinguals and some proposals suggest that this main difference between monolinguals and bilinguals is related to bilinguals' enhanced capacity of inhibiting irrelevant information. This has led to the proposal of the so-called bilingual advantage in inhibitory skills. However, recent studies have cast some doubt on the locus and generality of the alleged bilingual advantage in inhibitory skills. In the current study we investigated inhibitory skills in a large sample of 252 monolingual and 252 bilingual children who were carefully matched on a large number of indices. We tested their performance in a verbal Stroop task and in a nonverbal version of the same task (the number size-congruency task). Results were unequivocal and showed that bilingual and monolingual participants performed equally in these two tasks across all the indices or markers of inhibitory skills explored. Furthermore, the lack of differences between monolingual and bilingual children extended to all the age ranges tested and was not modulated by any of the independent factors investigated. In light of these results, we conclude that bilingual children do not exhibit any specific advantage in simple inhibitory tasks as compared to monolinguals.

In three experiments we compared the performance of native English speakers to that of Spanish-English and Dutch-English bilinguals on a masked morphological priming lexical decision task. The results do not show significant differences across the three experiments. In line with recent meta-analyses, we observed a graded pattern of facilitation across stem priming with transparent suffixed primes (e.g., viewer-view), opaque suffixed or pseudo-suffixed primes (e.g., corner-corn) and form control primes (e.g., freeze-free). Priming was largest in the transparent condition, smallest in the form condition and intermediate in the opaque condition. Our data confirm the hypothesis that bilinguals largely adopt the same processing strategies as native speakers (e.g., Lemhöfer et al., 2008), and constrain the hypothesis that bilinguals rely more heavily on whole-word processing in their second language (Ullman, 2004(Ullman, , 2005Clahsen et al., 2010). The observed pattern of morphological priming is in line with earlier monolingual studies, further highlighting the reality of semantic transparency effects in the initial stages of word recognition.

Bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals in a variety of tasks that do not tap into linguistic processes. The origin of this bilingual advantage has been questioned in recent years. While some authors argue that the reason behind this apparent advantage is bilinguals' enhanced executive functioning, inhibitory skills and/or monitoring abilities, other authors suggest that the locus of these differences between bilinguals and monolinguals may lie in uncontrolled factors or incorrectly matched samples. In the current study we tested a group of 180 bilingual children and a group of 180 carefully matched monolinguals in a child-friendly version of the ANT task. Following recent evidence from similar studies with children, our results showed no bilingual advantage at all, given that the performance of the two groups in the task and the indices associated with the individual attention networks were highly similar and statistically indistinguishable.

We propose and test a theoretical perspective in which a universal hallmark of successful literacy acquisition is the convergence of the speech and orthographic processing systems onto a common network of neural structures, regardless of how spoken words are represented orthographically in a writing system. During functional MRI, skilled adult readers of four distinct and highly contrasting languages, Spanish, English, Hebrew, and Chinese, performed an identical semantic categorization task to spoken and written words. Results from three complementary analytic approaches demonstrate limited language variation, with speech-print convergence emerging as a common brain signature of reading proficiency across the wide spectrum of selected languages, whether their writing system is alphabetic or logographic, whether it is opaque or transparent, and regardless of the phonological and morphological structure it represents.

Numerous studies in psychology, cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics have used pictures of objects as stimulus materials. Currently, authors engaged in cross-linguistic work or wishing to run parallel studies at multiple sites where different languages are spoken must rely on rather small sets of black-and-white or colored line drawings. These sets are increasingly experienced as being too limited. Therefore, we constructed a new set of 750 colored pictures of concrete concepts. This set, MultiPic, constitutes a new valuable tool for cognitive scientists investigating language, visual perception, memory and/or attention in monolingual or multilingual populations. Importantly, the MultiPic databank has been normed in six different European languages (British English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian and German). All stimuli and norms are freely available at http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/multipic .