Abstract
In recent decades several authors have suggested that bilinguals exhibit enhanced cognitive control as compared to monolinguals and some proposals suggest that this main difference between monolinguals and bilinguals is related to bilinguals’ enhanced capacity of inhibiting irrelevant information. This has led to the proposal of the so-called bilingual advantage in inhibitory skills. However, recent studies have cast some doubt on the locus and generality of the alleged bilingual advantage in inhibitory skills. In the current study we investigated inhibitory skills in a large sample of 252 monolingual and 252 bilingual children who were carefully matched on a large number of indices. We tested their performance in a verbal Stroop task and in a nonverbal version of the same task (the number size-congruency task). Results were unequivocal and showed that bilingual and monolingual participants performed equally in these two tasks across all the indices or markers of inhibitory skills explored. Furthermore, the lack of differences between monolingual and bilingual children extended to all the age ranges tested and was not modulated by any of the independent factors investigated. In light of these results, we conclude that bilingual children do not exhibit any specific advantage in simple inhibitory tasks as compared to monolinguals.
References
(2012). Bilingualism enriches the poor enhanced cognitive control in low-income minority children. Psychological Science, 23, 1364–1371.
(1999). Word frequency, repetition, and lexicality effects in word recognition tasks: Beyond measures of central tendency. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 128, 32–55.
(1999). Increased Stroop facilitation effects in schizophrenia are not due to increased automatic spreading activation. Schizophrenia Research, 39, 51–64.
(1999). Extracting parity and magnitude from Arabic numerals: Developmental changes in number processing and mental representation. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 74, 286–308.
(2006). Effect of bilingualism and computer video game experience on the Simon task. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale, 60, 68–79.
(2009). Bilingualism: The good, the bad, and the indifferent. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12, 3–11.
(2010). Cognitive and Linguistic Processing in the Bilingual Mind. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19, 19–23.
(2007). Bilingualism as a protection against the onset of symptoms of dementia. Neuropsychologia, 45, 459–464.
(2004). Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: Evidence from the Simon task. Psychology and Aging, 19, 290–303.
(2012). Bilingualism: Consequences for mind and brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16, 240–250.
(2006). Dual-modality monitoring in a classification task: The effects of bilingualism and ageing. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 59, 1968–1983.
(2008). Cognitive control and lexical access in younger and older bilinguals. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 859–873.
(2004). Attention and inhibition in bilingual children: Evidence from the dimensional change card sort task. Developmental Science, 7, 325–339.
(2005). Bilingualism across the lifespan: The rise and fall of inhibitory control. International Journal of Bilingualism, 9, 103–119.
(2008). Bilingual experience and executive functioning in young children. Developmental Science, 11, 282–298.
(1995). Interference and facilitation effects during selective attention: An H215O PET study of Stroop task performance. NeuroImage, 2, 264–272.
(1973). The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy: A critique of language statistics in psychological research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 12, 335–359.
(2008). How does bilingualism improve executive control? A comparison of active and reactive inhibition mechanisms. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 302–312.
(2009). On the bilingual advantage in conflict processing: Now you see it, now you don’t. Cognition, 113, 135–149.
(2008). Bilingualism aids conflict resolution: Evidence from the ANT task. Cognition, 106, 59–86.
(2006). Cognition through the lifespan: Mechanisms of change. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 131–138.
(2002). Testing the efficiency and independence of attentional networks. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14, 340–347.
(2003). DMDX: A Windows display program with millisecond accuracy. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 35, 116–124.
(2012). Publication bias and the failure of replication in experimental psychology. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 19, 975–991.
(2000). The development of automaticity in accessing number magnitude. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 76, 104–122.
(1992). On the representation and use of language information in bilinguals. In , Cognitive processing in bilinguals (pp. 207–220). Amsterdam, The Netherland: Elsevier.
(1998). Mental control of the bilingual lexico-semantic system. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1, 67–81.
(2010). The impact of bilingualism on the executive control and orienting networks of attention. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 315–325.
(2011). Are there bilingual advantages on nonlinguistic interference tasks? Implications for the plasticity of executive control processes. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18, 625–658.
(2008). Does bilingualism hamper lexical access in speech production?. Acta Psychologica, 127, 277–288.
(1987). A size-congruency effect in memory for visual shape. Memory & Cognition, 15, 531–543.
(2011). Sequential analysis of the numerical Stroop effect reveals response suppression. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37, 1243–1249.
(2012). Conflict monitoring and resolution: Are two languages better than one? Evidence from reaction time and event-related brain potentials. Brain Research, 1446, 71–90.
(2008). Language selection in bilingual speech: Evidence for inhibitory processes. Acta Psychologica, 128, 416–430.
(2010). The Revised Hierarchical Model: A critical review and assessment. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 373–381.
(2008). Cross-language lexical processes and inhibitory control. The Mental Lexicon, 3, 349–374.
(1986). Response times: Their role in inferring elementary mental organization (1st ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
(2010). Distinct neural correlates for two types of inhibition in bilinguals: Response inhibition versus interference suppression. Brain and Cognition, 74, 347–357.
(2013). Bilingualism interacts with domain in a working memory task: Evidence from aging. Psychology and Aging, 28, 28–34.
(2008). The development of two types of inhibitory control in monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11, 81–93.
(2010). A review of the day-night task: The Stroop paradigm and interference control in young children. Developmental Review, 30, 308–330.
(2007). What did Simon say? Revisiting the bilingual advantage. Developmental Science, 10, 719–726.
(2012). The nature and organization of individual differences in executive functions: four general conclusions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21, 8–14.
(2013). There is no coherent evidence for a bilingual advantage in executive processing. Cognitive Psychology, 66, 232–258.
(2007). CheckVocal: A program to facilitate checking the accuracy and response time of vocal responses from DMDX. Behavior Research Methods, 39, 859–862.
(2006). Brain mechanism of Stroop interference effect in Chinese characters. Brain Research, 1072, 186–193.
(1979). Group reaction time distributions and an analysis of distribution statistics. Psychological Bulletin, 86, 446–461.
(2011). Attentional inhibition in bilingual naming performance: Evidence from delta-plot analyses. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 184.
(2012). A bilingual advantage in visual language discrimination in infancy. Psychological Science, 23, 994–999.
(1967). Auditory S-R compatibility: The effect of an irrelevant cue on information processing. Journal of Applied Psychology, 51, 300–304.
(1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Experimental Psychology, 18, 643–662.
(2007). Brain potentials reveal unconscious translation during foreign-language comprehension. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 12530–12535.
(2008). Developing access to number magnitude: A study of the SNARC effect in 7- to 9-year-olds. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 101, 99–113.
(1998). Orthographic neighborhood effects in bilingual word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 458–483.
(2007). Visual language discrimination in infancy. Science, 316, 1159–1159.
