Verbal and nonverbal cognitive control in bilinguals and interpreters.

Abstract

The present study explored the relation between language control and nonverbal cognitive control in different bilingual populations. We compared monolinguals, Dutch-French unbalanced bilinguals, balanced bilinguals, and interpreters on the Simon task (Simon & Rudell, 1967) and the Attention Network Test (ANT; Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz, & Posner, 2002). All bilingual groups showed a smaller congruency effect in the Simon task than the monolingual group. They were also faster overall in the ANT. Furthermore, interpreters outperformed unbalanced, but not balanced, bilinguals in terms of overall accuracy on both tasks. In the ANT, the error congruency effect was significantly smaller for interpreters and balanced bilinguals. Using a measure of switching fluency in language production, this study also found direct evidence for a relation between language control and executive control. This relation was only observed in balanced bilinguals, where fluent switching was correlated with the Simon effect. These findings support the existence of a bilingual advantage and also indicate that different patterns of bilingual language use modulate the nature and extent of a cognitive control advantage in multilingual populations.

Examining the effects of active versus inactive bilingualism on executive control in a carefully matched non-immigrant sample

“…Some studies have examined effects of bilingualism in a non-immigrant sample and have found positive effects for healthy adults (e.g., Bak, Nissan, Allerhand, & Deary, 2014;Costa et al, 2008;Woumans, Ceuleers, Van der Linden, Szmalec, & Duyck, 2015) and dementia patients (Alladi et al, 2013;Woumans, Santens et al, 2015). On the other hand, studies with non-immigrant samples did not observe a cognitive effect of bilingualism in children (e.g., Antón et al, 2014), younger adults (e.g., Kousaie & Phillips, 2012a, although some differences were found in the ERP data), healthy older adults (e.g., Kousaie & Phillips, 2012b), and dementia patients (e.g., Chertkow et al, 2010;Lawton, Gasquoine, & Weimer, 2015).…”

Classes in Translating and Interpreting Produce Differential Gains in Switching and Updating

“…A few studies found that bilingualism did not bring WM advantage as measured by WM spans (e.g., Ratiu and Azuma, 2015). Bilingual advantage in monitoring (as indicated by shortened reaction times in tasks containing conflicts or by mixing cost in the color-shape task) was reported too (e.g., Barac and Bialystok, 2012; Abutalebi et al, 2015; Woumans et al, 2015). However, null bilingual effects have also been reported in the Simon task (e.g., Gathercole et al, 2014; Kirk et al, 2014), the Stroop task (e.g., Kousaie and Phillips, 2012) and the flanker task (e.g., Bialystok et al, 2010).…”

“…The inhibition advantage from bilingualism was evidenced in different tasks, such as the Simon task (e.g., Bialystok et al, 2004; Carlson and Meltzoff, 2008; Woumans et al, 2015), the Stroop task (e.g., Bialystok et al, 2008; Blumenfeld and Marian, 2011), the flanker task (e.g., de Abreu et al, 2012; Poarch and Bialystok, 2015) and the Attention Network Test (ANT; a complex version of flanker) (e.g., Costa et al, 2008; Marzecová et al, 2013). Bilingual advantage in switching was shown in the color-shape task (e.g., Prior and Macwhinney, 2010; Prior and Gollan, 2011).…”

“…The answer to this question could partly answer Hartsuiker’s (2015) question of when practice in one domain generalizes to another domain. Interpreting between two languages is a cognitively demanding task, and several recent studies (Yudes et al, 2011; Dong and Xie, 2014; Babcock and Vallesi, 2015; Morales et al, 2015; Woumans et al, 2015; Becker et al, 2016) have explored how interpreting experience brings cognitive advantages. Yudes et al (2011) found that professional simultaneous interpreters (SIs) outperformed general bilinguals in the WCST task, but not in the task of Simon.…”

Short-Term Memory Improvement After Simultaneous Interpretation Training

“…Dong and Xie (2014) compared students of interpretation to students of other subjects on the flanker task and found no difference in performance. Similarly, Woumans and colleagues found no differences between students of interpretation and balanced bilinguals on the Attention Network Test (ANT) and Simon task (Woumans et al 2015).…”