Effects of Bilingualism and Trilingualism in L2 Production: Evidence from Errors and Self-Repairs in Early Balanced Bilingual and Trilingual Adults

Abstract

Through analyzing response latencies, errors, and self-repairs in Mandarin, this investigation explores how monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual adults process their speech production differently using cognitive control mechanisms. In this study we conducted two experiments involving speech production in Mandarin. In the two experiments, 81 adults participated and were categorized into three groups: Mandarin monolingual, Hakka-Mandarin bilingual, and Hakka-Mandarin-Minnan trilingual. In Experiment 1 (unpreprogrammed task), each subject read 250 targets that were presented on a computer screen, one at a time, using E-prime; in Experiment 2 (preprogrammed task), each subject read 466 targets printed on A4 paper. Experiment 1 showed that bilinguals and trilinguals outperformed monolinguals in every aspect examined in this research, revealing the presence of bilingual and trilingual advantages in inhibitory control. Interestingly, in Experiment 2, we found a more complex pattern of results: a trilingual advantage in attentional control occurred during L2 production in terms of the number of errors and error correction; however, the bilingual group did not maintain this advantage in the task requiring attentional control. These experimental results revealed that the differences between the language groups became clearer when the inhibitory control demands increased and that compared with the trilingual advantage, the bilingual advantage in inhibitory control emerged in more limited contexts.

Does the Bilingual Advantage in Cognitive Control Exist and If So, What Are Its Modulating Factors? A Systematic Review

“…Of the 56, 46 were original studies [7,14,21,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,69] 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) [14,21,27,29,30,31,32,34,38,45,…”

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

“…Monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual participants were tested in that study. Hsu [44] found that for the trilingual participants, a clear advantage in inhibitory and attentional control existed while for the bilingual participants only an advantage in inhibitory control was found when compared to the monolinguals. In a recent study by Hsu [61], balanced and unbalanced bilinguals were found to be better than the monolinguals on the non-contextual single-character reading task (regardless of their first language background), but not on the contextual multi-word task.…”

“…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.…”

“…Bialystok and colleagues [36], for instance, used the Luria's tapping task [90], Opposite Worlds task [91], and reverse categorization task [92] and found evidence in favor of the bilingual advantage because bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on all three executive functioning tasks. Hsu [44] used a language production task and analyzed the errors and self-repairs of the participants. In the first experiment, a clear advantage in inhibitory control was found for both the bilingual and the trilingual participants than for the monolingual participants.…”

“…Bialystok correctly pointed to this weakness by stating that it is claiming evidence from non-evidence [123]. So far, several studies with large sample sizes have been conducted [e.g., 21,44,46], but they failed to find a bilingual advantage in cognitive control [21,46]. However, we Preprints (www.preprints.org) | NOT PEER-REVIEWED | Posted: 4 February 2019 Preprints (www.preprints.org) | NOT PEER-REVIEWED | Posted: 4 February 2019 doi:10.20944/preprints201902.0038.v1…”