Abstract
The need for executive control (EC) during bilingual language processing is thought to enhance these abilities, conferring a “bilingual advantage” on EC tasks. Recently, the reliability and robustness of the bilingual advantage has been questioned, with many variables reportedly affecting the size and presence of the bilingual advantage. This study investigates one further variable that may affect bilingual EC abilities: the similarity of a bilingual's two languages. We hypothesize that bilinguals whose two languages have a larger degree of orthographic overlap will require greater EC to manage their languages compared to bilinguals who use two languages with less overlap. We tested three groups of bilinguals with language pairs ranging from high- to low-similarity (German-English (GE), Polish-English (PE), and Arabic-English (AE), respectively) and a group of English monolinguals on a Stroop and Simon task. Two components of the bilingual advantage were investigated: an interference advantage, such that bilinguals have smaller interference effects than monolinguals; and a global RT advantage, such that bilinguals are faster overall than monolinguals. Between bilingual groups, these effects were expected to be modulated by script similarity. AE bilinguals showed the smallest Stroop interference effects, but the longest overall RTs in both tasks. These seemingly contradictory results are explained by the presence of cross-linguistic influences in the Stroop task. We conclude that similar-script bilinguals demonstrated more effective domain-general EC than different-script bilinguals, since high orthographic overlap creates more cross-linguistic activation and increases the daily demands on cognitive control. The role of individual variation is also discussed. These results suggest that script similarity is an important variable to consider in investigations of bilingual executive control abilities.
Highlights
Human language is a remarkably complicated ability, requiring timely coordination and recruitment of cognitive resources
The results revealed a significant interference effect when collapsed over groups, such that RTs were slower for incongruent trials (M = 462 ms, SE = 10 ms) than control trials (M = 435 ms, SE = 10 ms; t = 3.38; Table 7, Figure 3A)
The current study investigated the relationship between script similarity and bilingual executive control
Summary
Human language is a remarkably complicated ability, requiring timely coordination and recruitment of cognitive resources. It is generally accepted that even in completely monolingual language processing contexts, both of a bilingual’s languages are activated in parallel This non-selective access to the bilingual lexicon is supported by a wealth of evidence demonstrating that the second language (L2) can have both detrimental and facilitatory effects on first language (L1) processing, and vice versa (e.g., Soares and Grosjean, 1984; Poulisse and Bongaerts, 1994; van Heuven et al, 1998, 2008; Colomé, 2001; van Hell and Dijkstra, 2002; Thierry and Wu, 2004, 2007; Rodriguez-Fornells et al, 2005; Kerkhofs et al, 2006; Midgley et al, 2008; Martin et al, 2009; Degani and Tokowicz, 2010; see reviews in Dijkstra and van Heuven, 2002; Kroll et al, 2006, 2012; Brysbaert and Duyck, 2010). Neuroimaging research has demonstrated that bilinguals activate brain areas involved in executive control when processing one or both of their languages (e.g., RodriguezFornells et al, 2005; Hernandez and Meschyan, 2006; van Heuven et al, 2008; Parker Jones et al, 2011), suggesting an interdependence of executive control and language processing in the bilingual brain
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