The Role of Cognitive Development and Strategic Task Tendencies in the Bilingual Advantage Controversy.

Esli Struys,Evy Woumans,Wouter Duyck

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01790

Esli Struys, Evy Woumans + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01790

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Abstract

Recent meta-analyses have indicated that the bilingual advantage in cognitive control is not clear-cut. So far, the literature has mainly focussed on behavioral differences and potential differences in strategic task tendencies between monolinguals and bilinguals have been left unexplored. In the present study, two groups of younger and older bilingual Dutch–French children were compared to monolingual controls on a Simon and flanker task. Beside the classical between-group comparison, we also investigated potential differences in strategy choices as indexed by the speed-accuracy trade-off. Whereas we did not find any evidence for an advantage for bilingual over monolingual children, only the bilinguals showed a significant speed-accuracy trade-off across tasks and age groups. Furthermore, in the younger bilingual group, the trade-off effect was only found in the Simon and not the flanker task. These findings suggest that differences in strategy choices can mask variations in performance between bilinguals and monolinguals, and therefore also provide inconsistent findings on the bilingual cognitive control advantage.

Highlights

The bilingual advantage in cognitive control assumes that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in conflict tasks, such as the Simon or flanker, due to their continued practice in handling betweenlanguage competition
Cognitive control tasks were analyzed by mean reaction times of correct trials (RT) and accuracy scores (ACC)
On the Simon task, data from one younger monolingual and one younger bilingual participant were excluded from further analyses due to performance below chance accuracy level of 60%

Summary

Introduction

The bilingual advantage in cognitive control assumes that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in conflict tasks, such as the Simon or flanker, due to their continued practice in handling betweenlanguage competition (for a recent review, see Zhou and Krott, 2016) These tasks typically contain a mixture of non-conflict (i.e., congruent) and conflict (i.e., incongruent) trials. Besides the varying manifestation of effects, bilingual benefits have become highly controversial because of repeated failures to replicate this superior performance altogether (e.g., Paap et al, 2015; von Bastian et al, 2016; de Bruin and Della Sala, 2017; Paap, in press)

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