Bilingualism and cognition (original) (raw)
Related papers
Putting together bilingualism and executive function
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2016
Three important issues bear on understanding the connection between bilingualism and executive function. The first is the absence of a fine-grained task analysis for executive functions and other cognitive processes. The second is the absence of a theory of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the deployment of two or more languages and thus the absence of a solid basis on which to make predictions about what domain-general performances, if any, bilinguals should excel in. The third is the relation between neural and behavioral consequences of bilingualism. These three issues must be taken in account in trying to understand the variability among findings showing benefits of bilingualism for executive function.
Bilingualism and cognition: A focus on mechanisms
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2014
The goal of my keynote article, “Bilingualism and Cognition” (Valian, 2014), was to resolve the inconsistencies in effects of bilingualism on executive functions, whether the individuals were children, young adults, or old people. To summarize (and sharpen) my argument: 1.Especially in children and young adults, benefits of bilingualism for executive functions are not reliable. In old people, there are benefits for executive functions but contradictory results on delay of cognitive impairment, depending on whether studies are retrospective or prospective.2.All experiences that have benefits for executive functions and aging – and there are many – yield inconsistent effects. Bilingualism is not alone.3.Three reasons for inconsistencies in bilingualism and other experiences are: a.Executive function and cognitive reserve are broad cover terms for a variety of mechanisms, most of which are ill-understood. Because we mean different things by ‘executive function’ from one experiment to t...
Characterizing Bilingual Effects on Cognition: The Search for Meaningful Individual Differences
Brain Sciences
A debate over the past decade has focused on the so-called bilingual advantage—the idea that bilingual and multilingual individuals have enhanced domain-general executive functions, relative to monolinguals, due to competition-induced monitoring of both processing and representation from the task-irrelevant language(s). In this commentary, we consider a recent study by Pot, Keijzer, and de Bot (2018), which focused on the relationship between individual differences in language usage and performance on an executive function task among multilingual older adults. We discuss their approach and findings in light of a more general movement towards embracing complexity in this domain of research, including individuals’ sociocultural context and position in the lifespan. The field increasingly considers interactions between bilingualism/multilingualism and cognition, employing measures of language use well beyond the early dichotomous perspectives on language background. Moreover, new measu...
Neurobiology of Language, 2021
Whether a cognitive advantage exists for bilingual individuals has been the source of heated debate in the last decade. While empirical evidence putatively in favor of or against this alleged advantage has been frequently discussed, the potential sources of enhanced cognitive control in bilinguals have only been broadly declared, with no mechanistic elaboration of where, why, and how this purported link between bilingualism and enhanced language control develops, and how this enhancement transfers to, and subsequently improves, general executive function. Here, we evaluate different potential sources for a bilingual advantage and develop the assumptions one would have to make about the language processing system to be consistent with each of these notions. Subsequently, we delineate the limitations in the generalizations from language to overall executive function, and characterize where these advantages could be identified if there were to be any. Ultimately, we conclude that in or...
Bilingualism, social cognition and executive functions: A tale of chickens and eggs
Neuropsychologia, 2016
The influence of bilingualism on cognitive functioning is currently a topic of intense scientific debate. The strongest evidence for a cognitive benefit of bilingualism has been demonstrated in executive functions. However, the causal direction of the relationship remains unclear: does learning other languages improve executive functions or are people with better executive abilities more likely to become bilingual? To address this, we examined 90 male participants of the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936; 26 were bilingual, 64 monolingual. All participants underwent an intelligence test at age 11 years and were assessed on a wide range of executive and social cognition tasks at age 74. The only notable differences between both groups were found for the Simon Effect (which indexes stimulus-response conflict resolution; β=-.518, p=0.025) and a trend effect for the Faux Pas task (a measure of complex theory of mind; ToM, β=0.432, p=0.060). Controlling for the influence of childhood intelligenc...