Abstract
Grundy, Bialystok, and colleagues have reported that at short response-stimulus intervals bilinguals have smaller sequential congruency effects in flanker tasks compared to monolinguals. They interpret these differences to mean that bilinguals are more efficient at disengaging attentional control. Ten empirical studies are presented that show no differences between bilinguals and monolinguals under conditions that produced robust sequential congruency effects. These null results are discussed with respect to the rate at which sequential congruency effects dissipate and the fact these effects are not adaptive in the sense of improving overall performance. Arguments made by Goldsmith and Morton [1] that smaller sequential congruency effects should not be interpreted as “advantages” are extended. Evidence is also presented that neither simple congruency effects, nor sequential congruency effects, correlate across tasks. This lack of convergent validity is inconsistent with the hypothesis that either provides a measure of domain-general control that could underlie an advantage accrued through experience in switching languages. Results from other tasks purporting to show bilingual advantages in the disengagement of attention are also reviewed. We conclude that sequential congruency effects in nonverbal interference tasks and differences in the rate of disengaging attention are unlikely to contribute to our understanding of bilingual language control and that future research might productively examine differences in proactive rather than reactive control.
Highlights
The controversy regarding the hypothesis that bilinguals have better executive functioning (EF) has shifted from the EF components of inhibition, switching, and updating to hypothesized advantages in executive attention [2]
We conclude that sequential congruency effects in nonverbal interference tasks and differences in the rate of disengaging attention are unlikely to contribute to our understanding of bilingual language control and that future research might productively examine differences in proactive rather than reactive control
The purpose of this review is to focus on a recent set of empirical articles [3,4] and ensuing critiques [1,5,6,7,8] regarding the proposition that the magnitude of sequential congruency effects (SCEs) in nonverbal interference tasks such as the flanker task can be used as a valid and reliable measure of the ability to disengage attention and reveals an important consequence of bilingual experience
Summary
The controversy regarding the hypothesis that bilinguals have better executive functioning (EF) has shifted from the EF components of inhibition, switching, and updating to hypothesized advantages in executive attention [2]. SCEs are trial-to-trial sequence effects that occur in most nonverbal interference tasks and are defined as smaller interference effects when the previous trial is incongruent compared to when it is congruent as shown in Figure 1 and operationally defined as: SCE = (cI – cC) – (iI – iC), where lowercase letters represent the previous trial and uppercase letters the current trial. The groundwork for this debate is laid by Grundy, et al [3] when they hypothesized “that bilinguals can more rapidly disengage attention from irrelevant information than monolinguals in a simple flanker task” Grundy et al [3] concede, and many recent meta-analyses confirm [5,10,11] bilinguals do not have smaller interference scores compared to monolinguals
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