Abstract
The current study investigates the influence of L2 proficiency on cognitive control among three matched groups of unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals. Flanker task was administered to measure conflict monitoring and inhibition, and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) to measure mental set shifting. ANOVA analyses of the Flanker results showed no differences in inhibition across all groups and no interaction between group and condition. However, the Flanker results showed faster performance for the highest L2 proficiency group relative to the lowest L2 proficiency group in all conditions (incongruent, neutral, and congruent), which reflects better ability of conflict monitoring. Finally, ANOVA analyses of the WCST results showed no differences across all groups. These results altogether suggest that L2 proficiency has significant influence on cognitive control, but only in conflict monitoring, not in inhibition or mental set shifting.
Highlights
Cognitive control is the ability to control behavior and thought by maintaining, focusing on, or switching goals and plans while at the same time ignoring irrelevant information
In order to finely examine the influence of L2 proficiency upon cognitive control, data of participants’ demographic characteristics were collected
If there were differences on the two cognitive control task performances across groups, L2 proficiency would be considered as a significant factor
Summary
Cognitive control is the ability to control behavior and thought by maintaining, focusing on, or switching goals and plans while at the same time ignoring irrelevant information. In Vega-Mendoza et al (2015), executive functions were examined among late unbalanced young adult bilinguals with differing L2 and monolinguals (altogether 193 participants) They assessed three aspects of attention (sustained, selective and attentional switching), verbal fluency (letter and category), and L2 proficiency (by picture name verification task). In Dong and Xie (2014), the influence of the language switching experience and L2 proficiency on cognitive control was examined through a Flanker task and a mental set shifting test [Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST)] among four groups of young adult unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals (154 participants, mean age = 21.58). The results showed that there was no difference across all the groups in the Flanker task, but in the WCST bilinguals with interpreting experience performed better than non-interpreting bilinguals and a longer time of interpreting contributed more significantly to mental set shifting. The current study focuses on the young adults because their cognitive development is mature, not on children whose cognitive control is still developing or on older adults whose cognitive control is declining
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