Abstract
One of the most contentious topics in cognitive science concerns the impact of bilingualism on cognitive functions and neural resources. Research on executive functions has shown that bilinguals often perform better than monolinguals in tasks that require monitoring and inhibiting automatic responses. The robustness of this effect is a matter of an ongoing debate, with both sides approaching bilingual cognition mainly through measuring abilities that fall outside the core domain of language processing. However, the mental juggling that bilinguals perform daily involves language. This study takes a novel path to bilingual cognition by comparing the performance of monolinguals and bilinguals in a timed task that features a special category of stimulus, which has the peculiar ability to manipulate the cognitive parser into treating it as well-formed while it is not: grammatical illusions. The results reveal that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in detecting illusions, but they are also slower across the board in judging the stimuli, illusory or not. We capture this trade-off by proposing the Plurilingual Adaptive Trade-off Hypothesis (PATH), according to which the adaptation of bilinguals' cognitive abilities may (i) decrease fallibility to illusions by means of recruiting sharpened top-down control processes, but (ii) this is part of a larger bundle of effects, not all of which are necessarily advantageous.
Highlights
Speaking more than one language has been argued to confer certain anatomical and behavioral effects
The robustness of this effect is a matter of an ongoing debate, with both sides approaching bilingual cognition mainly through measuring abilities that fall outside the core domain of language processing
This study takes a novel path to bilingual cognition by comparing the performance of monolinguals and bilinguals in a timed task that features a special category of stimulus, which has the peculiar ability to manipulate the cognitive parser into treating it as well-formed while it is not: grammatical illusions
Summary
Speaking more than one language has been argued to confer certain anatomical and behavioral effects. The peculiarity of the tested stimuli is that it appears well-formed, through blending two locally coherent templates, comparison of events and comparison of individuals, in a way that does not involve any marked deviation from what the parser expects to encounter in a well-formed comparative structure [29, 39] In this sense, the task approaches bilingual linguistic processing in a novel way, because it differs from previous research that found an enhanced bilingual performance in acceptability tasks that tested anomalies such as ‘If I am sick again tomorrow, I will have to see my fireman’ [40, 41]. This happens because there is no salient cue in the stimulus that facilitates the inhibition of the automatic assumption that the sentence has meaning
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