Abstract
The impact of bilingual education and bilingual experience on working memory has been an important and controversial issue in the field of psycholinguistics. Taking Chinese-English bilinguals as an example, this study aims to investigate the differences in emotional working memory between proficient and non-proficient bilinguals by using delayed matching-to-sample task paradigm and the more complex N-back task in emotional contexts. The results show that proficient bilinguals may have better performance on both of these two working memory tasks than non-proficient bilinguals, and the advantage effects can be more apparent under high memory load conditions. In addition, the negative emotion context could have a positive impact on complex N-back tasks. This study supports the notion that bilingual experience can promote the development of an individual’s cognitive ability and enable individuals to possess more advantages in working memory even in the presence of emotional contexts.
Highlights
Executive control is an essential and core cognitive function in goal-oriented behavior control and self-control, which are highly associated with cognitive development and sociality development (Hughes and Ensor, 2007; Best et al, 2009)
The results showed a main effect of language groups [F (1, 55) = 17.79, p < 0.001, and η2p = 0.24], the accuracy of proficient bilinguals (86.6%) was higher than that of non-proficient bilinguals (78.7%)
The present study indicated that it was possible that the promotion effect of bilingual experience on information retention under non-emotional conditions could be transferred to promote the retention of information in the emotional contexts
Summary
Executive control is an essential and core cognitive function in goal-oriented behavior control and self-control, which are highly associated with cognitive development and sociality development (Hughes and Ensor, 2007; Best et al, 2009). The executive control includes sub-functional components such as working memory, inhibition control, and cognitive switching (Jurado and Rosselli, 2007; Seeley et al, 2007). A large number of studies have found that abundant bilingual experience is conducive to promoting the development of an individual’s abilities related to executive controls such as conflict resolution, cognitive switching, and memory storage; and this effect is called “Bilingual advantage” (Bialystok et al, 2010; Prior and MacWhinney, 2010; Morales et al, 2013; Bialystok, 2017; Scaltritti et al, 2017). Bialystok et al (2010) tested
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