Differences in Driver Distractibility Between Monolingual and Bilingual Drivers

Abstract

The present research sought to bridge the gap between research on driver distraction and the bilingual advantage by testing monolingual and bilinguals in a driving simulation similar to those encountered by drivers on a daily basis. The Lane Change Test (LCT) was used to test driving performance in the presence of a delayed digit recall task (2-back task) and three types of peripheral detection tasks (PDTs). Although performance came to be degraded as the complexity of tasks increased, the overall performance of the bilinguals was more negatively affected than their monolingual counterparts across the LCT, PDT, and 2-back task. Implications and limitations are discussed.