Abstract
A large sample (N = 141) of college students participated in both a conjunctive visual search task and an ambiguous figures task that have been used as tests of selective attention. Tests for effects of bilingualism on attentional control were conducted by both partitioning the participants into bilinguals and monolinguals and by treating bilingualism as a continuous variable, but there were no effects of bilingualism in any of the tests. Bayes factor analyses confirmed that the evidence substantially favored the null hypothesis. These new findings mesh with failures to replicate language-group differences in congruency-sequence effects, inhibition-of-return, and working memory capacity. The evidence that bilinguals are better than monolinguals at attentional control is equivocal at best.
Highlights
Fluent bilinguals have acquired two lexicons and two grammars and must be able to select the intended words and rules as they switch back and forth between their two languages
The present study, together with the null results reported by Ratiu et al (2017) seriously dampen the likelihood that bilingual advantages will consistently occur in search tasks
The review of the relevant prior literature showed that significant bilingual advantages in executive functioning were relatively rare and that the average effect size was very small and plausibly due to file drawer and publication biases
Summary
Fluent bilinguals have acquired two lexicons and two grammars and must be able to select the intended words and rules as they switch back and forth between their two languages. This is usually viewed as non-trivial because both languages are coactivated during production and comprehension (see Paap, 2019 for a review). If the inhibitory control exercised at either the lexical or articulatory-response levels involves a general (domain-free) inhibitory-control mechanism and if this recruitment of general inhibitory control is functionally greater than the levels sustained by monolinguals in speaking a single language and in pursuing the myriad of goals required by everyday life, bilingual advantages in inhibitory control would result. As we have repeatedly speculated (Paap and Greenberg, 2013; Paap et al, 2015; Paap, 2018, 2019) this logical chain can be broken at any link and it should not be a surprise that the evidence for a bilingual advantage in inhibitory control is weak, at best
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