Recent research indicating that bilingualism is associated with enhanced executive function suggests that this enhancement may operate within a broader spectrum of cognitive abilities than previously thought (e.g., Stocco & Prat, 2014). In this study, we focus on metacognition or the ability to evaluate one's own cognitive performance (Flavell, 1979). Over the course of two experiments, we presented young healthy adult monolinguals and bilinguals with a perceptual two-alternative-forced-choice task followed by confidence judgements. Results from both experiments indicated that bilingual participants showed a disadvantage in metacognitive efficiency, determined through the calculation of Mratio (Maniscalco & Lau, 2014). Our findings provide novel insight into the potential differences in bilingual and monolingual cognition, which may indicate a bilingual disadvantage. Results are discussed with reference to the balance of advantages versus disadvantages associated with multilanguage learning.

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Bilingual individuals have been reported to show enhanced executive function in comparison to monolingual peers. However, the role of adverse emotional traits such as trait anxiety and rumination in bilingual cognitive control has not been established. Attentional Control Theory holds that anxiety disproportionately impacts processing efficiency (typically measured via reaction time) in comparison to accuracy (performance effectiveness). We administered eye tracking and behavioural measures of inhibition to young, healthy monolingual and highly proficient bilingual adults. We found that trait anxiety was a reliable risk factor for decreased inhibitory control accuracy in bilingual but not monolingual participants. These findings, therefore, indicate that adverse emotional traits may differentially modulate performance in monolingual and bilingual individuals, an interpretation which has implications both for ACT and future research on bilingual cognition.

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Research on bilingualism has often produced evidence for a bilingual advantage in interference control using visual paradigms such as the Simon Task (e.g., Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan, 2004) or the Attention Network Test (ANT; Costa, Hernández, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2008). Surprisingly, given that bilingual speakers must disentangle auditory messages, there is a dearth of work examining a bilingual advantage in the auditory modality. The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the most relevant literature in this field and to address future directions for this line of enquiry within developmental psychology, educational psychology, and cognitive neuroscience.