Bilingual Advantages in Inhibition or Selective Attention: More Challenges

A large sample (N = 141) of college students participated in both a conjunctive visual search task and an ambiguous figures task that have been used as tests of selective attention. Tests for effects of bilingualism on attentional control were conducted by both partitioning the participants into bilinguals and monolinguals and by treating bilingualism as a continuous variable, but there were no effects of bilingualism in any of the tests. Bayes factor analyses confirmed that the evidence substantially favored the null hypothesis. These new findings mesh with failures to replicate language-group differences in congruency-sequence effects, inhibition-of-return, and working memory capacity. The evidence that bilinguals are better than monolinguals at attentional control is equivocal at best

Other Language Proficiency Predicts Unique Variance in Verbal Fluency Not Accounted for Directly by Target Language Proficiency: Cross-Language Interference?

The purpose of the study was to investigate cross-language effects in verbal fluency tasks where participants name in English as many exemplars of a target as they can in one minute. A series of multiple regression models were used that employed predictors such as self-rated proficiency in English, self-rated proficiency in a language other than English, a picture naming task used to measure productive vocabulary, the percentage of English use, and the frequency of language switching. The main findings showed that self-rated proficiency in the non-English language accounted for unique variance in verbal fluency that was not accounted for directly by self-rated proficiency in English. This outcome is consistent with cross-language interference, but is also consistent with an account that assumes bilingual disadvantages in verbal fluency and picture naming are due to bilinguals having weaker links between semantic concepts and their phonological form. The present study is also discussed in terms of a broader framework that questions whether domain-general inhibition exists and also whether it plays an important role in bilingual language control