Effects of Task-Level Language Input on Bilingual Cognitive Advantage
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Abstract
Bilingualism—through learning and speaking two languages—has been considered to contribute to the development of enhanced cognitive control, including attention, inhibition, and switching. Theories, experimental work, and models suggest that both languages are always activated, and that creates a greater need for conflict processing, yet exactly how this cognitive demand is tightly coupled with one’s language processing is not fully understood. The current study aims to establish a cohesive view of cognitive control in bilingual and monolingual individuals at a crucial stage in cognitive development during early childhood. By altering the degree of lexical access required during the card sorting paradigm requiring rule-switching, the study attempts to address prior gaps in knowledge of the relationship between bilingualism and the mechanisms of language and cognitive control. Results suggest that bilingual advantages were prominent only when pictures were novel, where no activation of a corresponding label is expected. In contrast, monolinguals showed an advantage when pictures were familiar and sorted semantically, where activation of the corresponding lexical concept is expected. Children also demonstrated the best performance overall on the semantic task with only visual input, whereas they showed the largest switch costs on the semantic condition with both visual and spoken input. Here, we demonstrate that bilingual advantages are not demonstrated on language-based tasks regardless of spoken labels, but a bilingual disadvantage occurs on a visual semantic task with high demands for lexical access. Findings suggest that the bilingual advantage is heavily dependent on lexical access demands.