Language proficiency and executive control in proactive interference: Evidence from monolingual and bilingual children and adults

Abstract

Two studies are reported in which monolingual and bilingual children (Study 1) and adults (Study 2) completed a memory task involving proactive interference. In both cases, the bilinguals attained lower scores on a vocabulary test than monolinguals but performed the same on the proactive interference task. For the children, bilinguals made fewer intrusions from previous lists even though they recalled the same number of words. For the adults, bilinguals recalled more words than monolinguals when the scores were corrected for differences in vocabulary. In addition, there was a strong effect of vocabulary in which higher vocabulary participants recalled more words irrespective of language group. These results point to the important role of vocabulary in verbal performance and memory. They also suggest that bilinguals may compensate for weaker language proficiency with their greater executive control to achieve the same or better levels of performance as monolinguals.Previous research with children and adults has shown that lifelong bilingualism, defined as the regular use of two languages, has systematic consequences for language and cognitive performance. The impact on language proficiency is generally in the direction of a disadvantage for bilinguals: bilingual children develop vocabulary more slowly in each language than monolinguals speakers of that language and perform more poorly on measures of language proficiency (Bialystok & Feng, in press;Oller & Eilers, 2002), and bilingual adults have a smaller vocabulary (Portocarrero, Burright, & Donovick, 2007), produce fewer words in verbal fluency tasks (Gollan & Kroll, 2001;Michael & Gollan, 2005), with more and tip-of-the tongue experiences (Gollan & Acenas, 2004), and record longer reaction times on picture naming (Roberts, Garcia, Desrochers, & Hernandez, 2002), and lexical decision tasks (Randsell & Fischler, 1987).Another aspect of verbal performance is simple verbal recall. Here, too, bilinguals often perform more poorly than comparable monolinguals. In a combined analysis of three experiments involving 190 6-9 years old children, half of whom were bilingual, there was no difference in children's ability to recall increasingly long lists of animal names (Bialystok & Feng, in press), but similar research with adults indicates a different pattern. A memory study in which participants had to recall a list of 20 related words after either simply hearing the list or hearing the list while performing a distracting task showed significantly lower performance Mailing Address: Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada, Telephone: 416 736-2100 Ext. 66109, Fax: 416 736-5814, Email: E-mail: ellenb@yorku.ca. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published...

Working Memory Capacity: Is There a Bilingual Advantage?

“…This advantage was attributed to the higher demand for executive control in the letter fluency task relative to the semantic fluency task. Similarly, Bialystok and Feng (2009) showed that, despite lower vocabulary scores, bilinguals performed similarly to monolinguals in a proactive interference task. Moreover, bilinguals made fewer errors than monolinguals indicating better executive control.…”

Language and Task Switching in Polish-English Bilinguals

“…In another study by Bialystok and Feng (2009), where bilingual and monolingual children and adults performed a proactive interference task, a bilingual advantage concerning the control of attention was reported, as bilingual participants performed equally well as monolingual ones, although the former had smaller vocabularies, which should have had a negative effect on their overall performance. Like all of the above-mentioned studies, these findings show that bilinguals surpass monolinguals in terms of executive control.…”

Výkon bilingválnych jednotlivcov pri psychodiagnostickom vyšetrení kognitívnych funkcií v ich prvom a druhom jazyku

“…Celkový obrat v negatívnom chápaní bilingvizmu priniesli Peal a Lambert (1962), ktorí zistili lepšiu inteligenciu v bilingválnej skupine ako v kontrolnej, jednojazyčnej. Po tomto zistení nasleduje nespočetné množstvo výskumov poukazujúcich na pozitívny vplyv bilingvizmu na psychiku jednotlivca (Adi-Japha, Berberich-Artzi, Libnawi, 2010;Bassetti, 2007;Bialystok, 2011;Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan, 2004;Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2008;Bialystok & Feng, 2009;Kaushanskaya, Blumenfeld, & Marian, 2011;Kaushanskaya & Marian, 2009;Kessler & Quinn, 1980, 1987Torrance, Wu, Gowan, & Aliotti, 1970), z ktorých väčšina prebehla v prvom jazyku bilingválnych. Je otázne, či by sa kognitívne výhody dvojjazyčnosti preukázali aj v prípade testovania v druhom jazyku simultánnych dvojjazyčných.…”