Bilingual advantage and language switch: What's the linkage?

Abstract

International audienceWhether bilingualism affects executive functions is a topic of intense debate. While some studies have provided evidence of enhanced executive functions in bilinguals compared to monolinguals, other studies have failed to find advantages. In the present study, we investigated whether high opportunity of language switching could contribute to bilingual advantage. Advantages have been consistently found with Catalan-Spanish bilinguals who experience frequent opportunities of language switching. Fewer opportunities are experienced by speakers of Italian and one of the Italian dialects, the participants of our study. We anticipated reduced or no advantages with these participants. In Experiment 1, subjective estimates of familiarity with dialect failed to show a relationship with performances in different tasks involving executive control. In Experiment 2, we compared Italian-Venetian dialect bilinguals to Italian monolinguals in the flanker task, and no advantages were found either. Contrasting with results from Catalan-Spanish bilinguals, our results suggest that language switching plays a role in bilingual advantages

Benefits of foreign language learning and bilingualism: An analysis of published empirical research 2012–2019

“…Results of the Onnis, Chun, and Lou‐Magnuson () study supported a bilingual advantage in core statistical learning in adults: bilingualism was associated with better implicit statistical learning, which is a core cognitive ability underlying language. In seeking insight into the potential role that language switching might play in developing language processing, results from Scaltritti, Peressotti, and Miozzo () suggested that language switching, such as that which occurs often in Europe, could play a role in creating the bilingual advantage.…”

Differences in Working Memory With Emotional Distraction Between Proficient and Non-proficient Bilinguals

“…The impact of bilingual education on executive control has been an important and controversial issue in the field of psycholinguistics (Morales et al, 2013;Ratiu and Azuma, 2015;Grundy and Timmer, 2017;Antoniou, 2019). A large number of studies have found that abundant bilingual experience is conducive to promoting the development of an individual's abilities related to executive controls such as conflict resolution, cognitive switching, and memory storage; and this effect is called "Bilingual advantage" (Bialystok et al, 2010;Prior and MacWhinney, 2010;Morales et al, 2013;Bialystok, 2017;Scaltritti et al, 2017). For example, Bialystok et al (2010) tested children aged 3 and 4 with word-mapping tasks and found that bilingual children showed stronger inhibitory control ability, which would become more significant as the children got more secondary language experience.…”

Identifying a Threshold for the Executive Function Advantage in Bilingual Children

“…Bedore et al, 2012 on assessing language dominance). Several aspects known to vary in bilingual experience have been argued to have an effect on executive function performance, such as proficiency (Gutiérrez-Clellen, Calderón, & Ellis Weismer, 2004;Iluz-Cohen & Armon-Lotem, 2013;Rosselli, Ardila, Lalwani, & Vélez-Uribe, 2015), language dominance (Mueller Gathercole et al, 2014;Weber, Johnson, Riccio, & Liew, 2015), language exposure (Brito, Sebastián-Gallés, & Barr, 2015), and patterns of language switching (de Bruin et al, 2015;Verreyt, Woumans, Vandelanotte, Szmalec, & Duyck, 2015;Scaltritti, Peressotti, & Miozzo, 2015;Soveri, Rodriguez-Fornells, & Laine, 2011). A number of researchers are now calling for the integration of the variability of bilingual experience in the analyses (e.g.…”