Abstract
Bilinguals often show a disadvantage in lexical access on verbal fluency tasks wherein the criteria require the production of words from semantic categories. However, the pattern is more heterogeneous for letter (phonemic) fluency wherein the task is to produce words beginning with a given letter. Here, bilinguals often outperform monolinguals. One explanation for this is that phonemic fluency, as compared with semantic fluency, is more greatly underpinned by executive processes and that bilinguals exhibit better performance on phonemic fluency due to better executive functions. In this study, we re-analyzed phonemic fluency data from the Betula study, scoring outputs according to two measures that purportedly reflect executive processes: clustering and switching. Consistent with the notion that bilinguals have superior executive processes and that these can be used to offset a bilingual disadvantage in verbal fluency, bilinguals (35–65 years at baseline) demonstrated greater switching and clustering throughout the 15-year study period.
Highlights
The ability to communicate in more than one language—bilingualism or multilingualism —is common worldwide, and rapidly increasing (Moreno and Kutas, 2005; Bhatia and Ritchie, 2013)
The current study focuses only on phonemic fluency but here we contrast, across other studies, this form of language production with semantic fluency to illustrate the processes that are involved in the tasks and the explanations for why they are associated with a bilingual disadvantage/advantage
The current study aimed to investigate the contribution of executive control mechanisms to supporting phonemic fluency, thereby offering some clarity as to why a bilingual advantage is sometimes manifest in the phonemic fluency task (e.g., Ljungberg et al, 2013)
Summary
The ability to communicate in more than one language—bilingualism or multilingualism —is common worldwide, and rapidly increasing (Moreno and Kutas, 2005; Bhatia and Ritchie, 2013). Given that age has a small or minimal effect size on switching and clustering in the context of phonemic fluency (Troyer et al, 1997), we did not expect differences within groups across followup test periods These results would cohere nicely with the notion that the executive functions that bilinguals practice through everyday language switching can positively affect phonemic fluency and offset the bilingual disadvantage that is observed with other language production tasks such as semantic fluency (Gollan et al, 2002; Bialystok et al, 2008b; cf Luo et al, 2010). All participants signed a written informed consent and during each test session participants were requested to use glasses or hearing aids if normally used, and they were all tested individually
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