Abstract
Bilinguals purportedly outperform monolinguals in non-verbal tasks of cognitive control (the ‘bilingual advantage'). The most common explanation is that managing two languages during language production constantly draws upon, and thus strengthens, domain-general inhibitory mechanisms (Green 1998 Biling. Lang. Cogn. 1, 67–81. (doi:10.1017/S1366728998000133)). However, this theory cannot explain why a bilingual advantage has been found in preverbal infants (Kovacs & Mehler 2009 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 106, 6556–6560. (doi:10.1073/pnas.0811323106)). An alternative explanation is needed. We propose that exposure to more varied, less predictable (language) environments drive infants to sample more by placing less weight on consolidating familiar information in order to orient sooner to (and explore) new stimuli. To confirm the bilingual advantage in infants and test our proposal, we administered four gaze-contingent eye-tracking tasks to seven- to nine-month-old infants who were being raised in either bilingual (n = 51) or monolingual (n = 51) homes. We could not replicate the finding by Kovacs and Mehler that bilingual but not monolingual infants inhibit learned behaviour (experiment 1). However, we found that infants exposed to bilingual environments do indeed explore more than those exposed to monolingual environments, by potentially disengaging attention faster from one stimulus in order to shift attention to another (experiment 3) and by switching attention more frequently between stimuli (experiment 4). These data suggest that experience-driven adaptations may indeed result in infants exposed to bilingual environments switching attention more frequently than infants exposed to a monolingual environment.
Highlights
Bilinguals often outperform monolinguals in non-verbal tasks of cognitive control
Our data do not support the claim that infants raised in bilingual homes are better at inhibiting a learned behaviour than infants raised in monolingual homes
–100 disengagement disengagement and number of switches between two visual stimuli. This raises the possibility that infants adapt to bilingual environments partly by disengaging attention faster and switching attention more frequently
Summary
A metaanalysis of studies that compared the performance of bilinguals and monolinguals on conflict resolution tasks (e.g. the Stroop task) revealed a moderately significant bilingual advantage [1] At first blush, this finding augments our understanding of far-transfer effects (how practice in one domain (language) results in changes to other (non-language) domains) and may inform educational policies and social practice. To progress beyond the controversy and advance the science, in addition to carrying out more studies, we must come up with a theory that can account for the inconsistencies in the literature and explain when, how and why learning two or more languages improves cognitive control This is the focus of the current paper
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