Abstract
The issue of a bilingual advantage on executive functions has been a hotbed for research and debate. Brazilian studies with the minority language Hunsrückisch have failed to replicate the finding of a bilingual advantage found in international studies with majority languages. This raises the question of whether the reasons behind the discrepant results are related to the language’s minority status. The goal of this paper was to investigate the bilingual advantage on executive functions in studies with minority languages. This is a literature review focusing on state of the art literature on bilingualism and executive functions; as well as a qualitative analysis of the selected corpus in order to tackle the following questions: (1) is there evidence of a bilingual advantage in empirical studies involving minority languages? (2) are there common underlying causes for the presence or absence of the bilingual advantage? (3) can factors pertaining to the language’s minority status be linked to the presence or absence of a bilingual advantage? The analysis revealed that studies form a highly variable group, with mixed results regarding the bilingual advantage, as well as inconsistent controlling of social, cognitive and linguistic factors, as well as different sample sizes. As such, it was not possible to isolate which factors are responsible for the inconsistent results across studies. It is hoped this study will provide an overview that can serve as common ground for future studies involving the issue of a bilingual advantage with speakers of minority languages.
Highlights
The presence of cognitive advantages in bilingual individuals has been a worldwide hotbed for research
This paper is a literature review consisting of a qualitative analysis of studies concerning the effects of bilingualism on executive functioning in speakers of minority languages
We looked for the references in the selected papers and selected some additional papers that tap into the inclusion criteria of the corpus, because there may be not many articles in the field
Summary
The presence of cognitive advantages in bilingual individuals has been a worldwide hotbed for research. Ever since the pivotal study by Peal/Lambert (1962), bilingualism has been investigated generally under the premise that it might have positive impacts on cognition. One cognitive domain that is often investigated is executive functions (EF) – “self-directed actions needed to choose goals and to create, enact, and sustain actions toward those goals“ (Barkley 2012: 60). This research group, as well as others that were influenced by it, has investigated the potential advantage of bilinguals in executive functions and has suggested that something about the unique bilingual language experience gives rise to improvements in more general cognitive. Bialystok et al 2004; Bialystok/Craik/Luk 2008; Linck/Hoshino/Kroll 2008; Costa/Hernández/Sebastián-Gallés 2008; Costa et al 2009; Bialystok 2001)
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