Laura Babcock (University of Padova) & Antonino Vallesi (University of Padova)

lbabcock@gmail.com

Simultaneous interpretation; Inhibitory control; Language switching; Multilingualism; n-2 repetition cost

Simultaneous interpretation is an impressive cognitive feat which requires an individual to comprehend a stream of auditory material in one language and with a few seconds delay produce the same content in another language. This task necessitates the simultaneous use of two languages and therefore begs the question: how is language management accomplished during interpretation? One possibility is that interpretation represents a cooperative language context, similar to dense-code switching. In such a context both languages are maintained active and inhibitory control is reduced.

To examine whether inhibitory control is reduced after experience with interpretation, four groups of students with varying experience were assessed on a three language switching paradigm. The four student groups represented a full crossing of two experience variables: training in interpretation and recent practice with interpretation. The three language switching paradigm provided an empirical measure of the inhibition applied to abandoned languages. Trials which required a return to the language used two trials previously (e.g., English – Italian – English) were compared to trials which did not require a language repetition (e.g., French – Italian – English). The difference between these trials types, termed the n-2 repetition cost, provides an empirical signature of inhibitory control processes [1,2].

The four groups of students showed different patterns of n-2 repetition costs across the three languages (L1, L2, L3). These different patterns, however, did not appear to be connected to either training in interpretation or recent practice with interpretation. Instead, the differences may be due to other language characteristics. In particular, the n-2 repetition cost in the L2 correlated with self-rated speaking and understanding in the L2 (r = ‑.237, p = .053 and r = -.316, p = .009, respectively), suggesting that language proficiency may affect the use of inhibitory control in language management. The differences seen in the L1 n-2 repetition cost, on the other hand, may be due to the differing predominant bilingual interactional contexts of the groups. These results speak to the role that proficiency and interactional context have on language management and in turn on cognitive control abilities domain-generally. Further, these data promote the use of n-2 repetition costs as a pure measure of inhibition in switching tasks.

References

[1] Kiesel, A. et al. Control and interference in task switching–a review. Psychoogical Bulletin, 136:849–874. 2010.

[2] Koch, I., Gade, M., Schuch, S. & Philipp, A. M. The role of inhibition in task switching: a review. Psychonomic Bulletin Review, 17:1–14. 2010.

Julia Morales (University of Granada), Carlos J. Gómez-Ariza (University of Jaen) & Teresa Bajo (University of Granada)

mjulia@ugr.es

Bilingualism; Flanker task; Interference suppression; Monitoring; Response inhibition

Recent research shows that bilinguals excel monolinguals in coordinating different executive functions [1] [2]. We further explored this idea by employing an adapted version of the flanker task, which allowed for the measurement of interference suppression (congruent vs. incongruent trials) and response inhibition (go/no-go blocks). Importantly, we could also observe the performance with varying task demands. In the conflict condition, participants must ignore the flanking distractors and focus only on the direction of the target chevron to suppress interference. In the go/no-go blocks participants needed to pay attention to the flanking information to respond. Crucially, apart from these single blocks, there were mixed blocks (composed by intermixed trials of go/no-go and conflict blocks) that required an increase of monitoring resources since participants needed to process the flanking information and use it or ignore it depending on the demands of the trial.

In line with previous research, our results indicated that bilingualism benefited the performance in the mixed condition, where different cognitive control resources needed to work together to achieve the highest efficiency. We relate these results to the performance in the AX-Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT), which also requires participants to combine different control mechanisms (e.g., to withhold a prepotent response while maintaining context information). These data provide further support for the idea that bilingualism modulates the functioning of a whole cascade of processes engaged in cognitive control.

References

[1] Costa, A., Hernández, M., Costa-Faidella, J., Sebastián-Gallés, N. On the bilingual advantage in conflict processing: now you see it, now you don’t. Cognition, 113: 135–149, 2009.

[2] Morales, J., Yudes, C., Gómez-Ariza, C.J. & Bajo, M.T. Bilingualism modulates dual mechanisms of cognitive control: Evidence from ERPs. Neuropsychologia, 66: 157-169. 2015.

Eve Higby (Graduate Center of the City University of New York), Seamus Donnelly (Graduate Center of the City University of New York), & Jungmee Yoon (Graduate Center of the City University of New York)

evehigby@gmail.com

Inhibition; Second language acquisition; Reaction time; Ex-Gaussian

Several studies have reported superior performance on executive function tasks for bilinguals compared to monolinguals (e.g., Bialystok et al., 2008). However, some researchers have reported issues replicating this effect (e.g., Paap & Greenberg, 2013). Two common methodological choices may account for the inconsistent findings. Most published research has treated bilingualism as a categorical variable and focused on RT means rather than other distributional parameters.

Most studies of executive functioning in bilinguals include those with high proficiency in both languages. However, bilinguals also include those with non-balanced proficiencies of various levels, meaning that degree of bilingualism is in fact a continuous variable. The strength of cross-language interference is likely modulated by the degree of bilingualism, suggesting that executive functions may improve as L2 proficiency develops. In this study, we tested the relationship between L2 proficiency and performance on an inhibitory control task.

Most published research on this topic has used RT means as the dependent measure. However, theoretical models of RT imply that distributional tails are often more sensitive to individual differences (Balota & Yap, 2011). One promising approach to studying individual differences in cognitive processing is examining ex-Gaussian parameters from RT distribution, which include separate parameters for central tendency and tails. Calabria et al. (2011) re-analyzed two existing data sets and found that bilinguals had smaller central tendencies (mu) and tails (tau) across both congruent and incongruent trials, but a bilingual advantage in the difference between congruent and incongruent trials was only observed in tau.

In this study, we tested 42 native speakers of Brazilian-Portuguese with varying degrees of English (L2) proficiency using a Flanker task. We predicted that L2 proficiency would correlate negatively with both mu and tau in overall RTs. Furthermore, we expected a three-way interaction between proficiency, parameter (mu, tau), and condition (congruent, incongruent) showing an effect of proficiency on tau, but not mu, for incongruent, but not congruent, trials.

Ex-Gaussian parameters were estimated and analyzed in a mixed-effects model with proficiency, parameter, condition, and their interactions as fixed effects. Results revealed a main effect of proficiency (B = -59.56, t(76.9) = -2.21, p = 03), and an interaction between proficiency and condition (B = -53.184, t(120) = -2.54, p = .01), indicating that higher-proficiency participants had smaller parameter estimates across both conditions and that this effect was larger in the incongruent condition. The interaction between proficiency and parameter was non-significant as was the three-way interaction between proficiency, parameter, and condition.

The results suggest that bilinguals have better performance across conditions with increasing proficiency, but the pattern is larger for the incongruent than congruent condition. These findings may indicate that bilinguals with higher L2 proficiency develop not only inhibitory control but also overall efficient processing abilities.

References

[1] Balota, D. A., & Yap, M. J. (2011). Moving Beyond the Mean in Studies of Mental Chronometry: The Power of Response Time Distributional Analyses. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(3), 160–166. doi:10.1177/0963721411408885

[2] Bialystok, E., Craik, F., & Luk, G. (2008). Cognitive control and lexical access in younger and older bilinguals. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34(4), 859–873.

[3] Calabria, M., Hernández, M., Martin, C. D., & Costa, A. (2011). When the tail counts: the advantage of bilingualism through the ex-Gaussian distribution analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 1–8.

[4] Paap, K. R., & Greenberg, Z. I. (2013). There is no coherent evidence for a bilingual advantage in executive processing. Cognitive Psychology, 66(2), 232–258.

John G. Grundy & Ellen Bialystok (York University, Toronto ON)

jggrundy@gmail.com

Conflict adaptation; Sequential congruency effects; Bilingual advantage; Disengagement; Language

Behavioral evidence for cognitive control changes as a function of bilingualism on conflict resolution tasks and other higher-order executive function tasks has accrued for infants, children, adolescents, and older adults. Surprisingly however, this performance benefit is less consistently found in the young adult population. This has led some researchers to believe that there is no cognitive control advantage at all for bilinguals. Given that a bilingual advantage has been reported across the lifespan in multiple areas of cognitive control, we explored the possibility that previous analyses may have been too simplistic for the young adult population who are at peak cognitive performance. We examined the possibility that null performance effects on one of the most commonly used conflict resolution tasks in young adults come about by not taking into account the influence of conflict on previous trials. Bilinguals and monolinguals completed a flanker interference task. When we examined the typical flanker interference effect (difference between incongruent and congruent RTs), no effects involving group emerged. However, when we included previous trial congruency as a factor in the analysis, it was clear that bilinguals were less influenced by previous trial congruency than were monolinguals. We suggest that bilinguals are better able to rapidly disengage attention from previous trial congruency.

Merel Keijzer (University of Groningen) & Monika S. Schmid (University of Essex)

mschmid@essex.ac.uk

Healthy aging; Language proficiency; L1 attrition; Working Memory (WM); Set shifting tests; Language use ; Dutch; English

Recent years have seen a host of studies on healthy aging. The topicality of healthy aging fits in well with the increasingly larger proportion of elderly in developed countries [1]. It is well documented that cognitive resources tend to decline with age: processing speed, working memory, attention span and inhibition mechanisms are all reported to suffer due to changes in the neural substrate [2]. It is equally well known that such cognitive decline impacts on language. Intriguing in this respect is the now well-known research trend on cognitive and language controls in bilinguals. This work suggests that early bilinguals may possess a safeguard against age-related cognitive decline, even to the extent that the onset of dementia can be delayed substantially [3], [4]. However, mixed findings characterize this line of research, and even more so when late bilinguals are investigated. Not only is language and cognitive control in elderly late bilinguals vastly under-researched, but even studies on college-aged late bilinguals are far from uniform in their outcomes: while some work has found cognitive advantages for late bilinguals in their 20s, others have not [5], [6], [7].

In this study, an attempt is made to shed more light on this issue by examining a group of older (71+) late Dutch-English bilinguals, all L1 Dutch long-term émigrés in Australia. They took part in a series of language tests (comprising among other things language use and history questionnaire, vocabulary, and grammar measures) and cognitive measures (consisting of several working memory tasks, inhibition tasks, processing speed measurements, and set shifting tests). Their data were compared against youngest old (60-70) and middle-aged (40-50) controls. In addition, data was collected from age-matched Dutch and English monolingual control groups. The results show that, rather than the bilinguals outperforming the monolinguals as a group, individual differences very much characterize the findings. A three-way distinction emerged where a subset of the older bilinguals performed on a par with the monolinguals, while two other subsets produced markedly lower and markedly higher scores than the monolinguals, respectively. In other words, while a subset of the data appear to point in the direction of a bilingual cognitive advantage, another part of the data support an ‘overloading’ hypothesis where bilingualism hampers rather than facilitates performance on cognitive and language measures. Yet another subset suggest an indifferent result of late bilingualism. Although the oldest group often did produce poorer scores than their younger peers, this was not uniformly the case and the best performing oldest subjects often outperformed their younger peers on language and cognitive tasks alike.

References

[1] Alho, J.M. (2008). Migration, fertility, and aging in stable populations. Demography, 45(3), 641-650.

[2] Wingfield, A., & Grossman, M. (2006). Language and the aging brain: patterns of neural compensation revealed by functional brain imaging. Journal of Neurophysiology, 96(6), 2830-2839.

[3] Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I., Klein, R., & Viswanathan, M. (2004). Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: evidence from the Simon task. Psychology and aging, 19(2), 290.

[4] Bialystok, E., Craik, F., & Luk, G. (2008). Cognitive control and lexical access in younger and older bilinguals. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34(4), 859.

[5] Luk, G., Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I., & Grady, C. L. (2011). Lifelong bilingualism maintains white matter integrity in older adults. The Journal of Neuroscience, 31(46), 16808-16813.

[6] Tao, L., Marzecová, A., Taft, M., Asanowicz, D., & Wodniecka, Z. (2011). The efficiency of attentional networks in early and late bilinguals: the role of age of acquisition. Frontiers in psychology, 2, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00123

[7] Festman, J. (2012). Language control abilities of late bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15(3), 580-593.

Alison R. Shell (University of Maryland, College Park) & L. Robert Slevc (University of Maryland, College Park)

ashell@umd.edu

Bilingualism; Language production; Inhibitory Control; Language Switching; Dual task

An influential account of how bilingual speakers manage interference between languages is the inhibitory control (IC) model [1], which proposes that bilinguals rely on domain-general IC mechanisms to suppress the non-target language. Much of the evidence for the IC model is correlational; for example, individuals with higher scores on IC tasks tend to perform better on language-switching tasks (e.g., [2]) and findings of a “bilingual advantage” on IC tasks suggest that bilinguals’ extensive practice in controlling languages may transfer to improved IC abilities (e.g., [3]).

The current experiments aimed to go beyond these correlational findings by assessing language-switching costs while simultaneously manipulating demand on IC. If language switching requires IC, then taxing participants’ limited IC resources should increase language switching costs. In Experiment 1, participants switched between naming pictures in English (L1) and Spanish (L2) while simultaneously performing a Simon arrows task (responding to the direction of an arrow that could appear on either side of the screen while ignoring its location). Surprisingly, language switching costs were reduced during incongruent (vs. congruent) Simon arrow trials; i.e., switching was actually easier when IC was taxed. (Note that a control experiment pairing language switching with a task manipulating perceptual difficulty produced no such interaction, suggesting that these findings did not simply reflect the difficulty of a secondary task).

This reduction in language switching costs during an IC demanding dual task might reflect task prioritization, such that participants tended to prioritize the language task when IC demands were high. Experiment 2 thus used a paradigm requiring only one response, by combining language switching with a picture word interference paradigm, wherein conflict was manipulated via the relationship between to-be-named pictures and simultaneously presented distractor words. This task requires only one response (thus eliminating the possibility for differential task prioritization) and also involves conflict between lexical representations, which may be more analogous to conflict involved in language switching. However, switching costs were again not exacerbated when IC was taxed; if anything, switching was less costly during inhibition-demanding trials (with related distractors).

Experiment 3 tested whether these reduced switching costs in IC demanding contexts reflect conflict adaptation, where high conflict trials can lead to reduced conflict on following conflict trials (cf. [4]). Experiment 3 thus interleaved Simon arrow task trials with language switching task trials. Although conflict adaptation was observed across trials of the Simon arrow task, there was no evidence that this Simon conflict influenced language switching.

Overall, these findings fail to support a straightforward role of IC in bilingual language switching and suggest that language control, at least in the context of language-switching tasks, may not draw on domain-general IC.

References

[1] Green, D. W. Mental control of the bilingual lexico-semantic system. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1(02): 67-81, 1998.

[2] Linck, J. A., Schwieter, J. W., & Sunderman, G. Inhibitory control predicts language switching performance in trilingual speech production. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15(3): 651–662, 2012.

[3] Abutalebi, J., Della Rosa, P. A., Green, D. W., Hernandez, M., Scifo, P., Keim, R., … Costa, A. Bilingualism tunes the anterior cingulate cortex for conflict monitoring. Cerebral Cortex, 22(9): 2076–86, 2012.

[4] Kan, I. P., Teubner-Rhodes, S., Drummey, A. B., Nutile, L., Krupa, L., & Novick, J. M. To adapt or not to adapt: The question of domain-general cognitive control. Cognition, 129(3): 637–51, 2013.

Qian Zhou (University of Maryland) & Nan Jiang (University of Maryland)

qzhou1@umd.edu; njiang@umd.edu

Switching cost; L1-L2 processing; Visual word recognition; Monolingual and mixed context; Chinese English

Thirty Chinese-English bilinguals completed three lexical decision tasks — a Chinese monolingual condition, an English monolingual condition, and a mixed language condition. Critical stimuli in the mixed list consisted of both nonswitching and switching trials in both languages. A large number of fillers were added to minimize strategy and position effect. RT data was analyzed in two 2 X 2 Repeated Measures ANOVAs – language (Chinese vs. English in mixed condition) X switching (Switching vs. Nonswitching) and language (Chinese vs. English) X List (Monolingual list vs. nonswitching trials in Mixed list). While both analyses revealed a main effect of language, we did not observe a main effect of switching or a main effect of list, nor a significant interaction effect In other words, unlike in production tasks, asymmetrical language switching cost did not occur in a word recognition task. In addition, participants did not respond significantly faster in a monolingual condition than in a mixed language condition. We offered two explanations in line with our findings. First, while production task requires a top-down processing route through which inhibition is likely to be obligatory, word recognition task triggers bottom-up processing in which inhibition and suppression of the other language is not a necessary step. Second, an alternative explanation is that asymmetrical switching cost is more likely to be found in unbalanced bilinguals, but not among those highly proficient L2 learners who have been immersed in an L2 context for a rather long period of time.

References

[1] Costa A, Miozzo M, Caramazza A. Lexical selection in bilinguals: Do words in the bilingual’s two lexicons compete for selection? Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 365-397,1999.

[2] Finkbeiner M, Almeida J, Janssen N, Caramazza A. Lexical selection in ibilingual speech production does not involve language suppression. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32(5):1075-1089,2006.

[3] Green D. Mental control of the bilingual lexico-semantic system. Bilingual Language Cognition, 1, 67–8110, 1998.

[4] Guo T, Liu H, Misra M, Kroll JF. Local and global inhibition in bilingual word production: fMRI evidence from Chinese-English bilinguals. NeuroImage, 56, 2300–2309, 2011.

[5] Meuter RFI, Allport, Bilingual language switching in naming: Asymmetrical costs of language selection. Journal of Memory and Language, 40, 25-40, 1999.

[6] Misra M, Guo T, Bobb SC, Kroll JF. When bilinguals choose a single word to speak: Electrophysiological evidence for inhibition of the native language. Journal of Memory and Language, 67(1), 224-237, 2012.

[7] Philipp AM, Koch I. Inhibition in language switching: What is inhibited when switching between languages in naming tasks? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(5), 1187-1195.

Nathalie Gosselin (University of Montreal; International Laboratory of Brain, Music, and Sound Research -BRAMS; Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music – CRBLM), Ellen Bialystok (York University), Mihaela Felezeu (BRAMS), & Isabelle Peretz (University of Montreal; BRAMS; CRBLM)

nathalie.gosselin@umontreal.ca

Executive functioning, Stroop, Congenital amusia, Musical experience

Congenital amusia is a life-long musical disorder that cannot be explained by mental retardation, deafness or lack of exposure [1]. Amusic individuals tend to listen and enjoy musical activities less than the normal population does. As a consequence, amusics may show impairments in general cognitive functioning. Indeed, there is increasing evidence that musical experience enhances cognitive functions in general [2], not just musical abilities.

Here, we explore whether the limited and abnormal musical experience of amusic adults leads to diminished executive functioning. To this end, amusic individuals and matched non-amusics with and without musical training first completed executive and control conditions in the visual domain, in a situation referred to as the Simon arrows task [3]. As expected, musicians were faster than both amusics and nonmusicians. However, this difference in speed of processing was not associated to different sensitivity to conflict.

The amusic adults were also tested with the Stroop task. The cognitive control condition (ex. the word GREEN written in red ink) and the control conditions (color naming and reading) were all performed within the normal range. They performed within the normal range in the cognitive control condition.

Thus, these findings rule out a general executive impairment as a source of musical difficulties in congenital amusia.

References

[1] Peretz, I. The biological foundations of music: Insights from congenital amusia. The Psychology of Music. Ed D Deutch, Elsevier. 551-564, 2013.

[2] Moreno S et al. Short-Term music training enhances verbal intelligence and executive function. Psychological Science, 22, 1425-1433, 2011.

[3] Bialystok E & DePape AM. Musical expertise, bilingualism, and executive functioning. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 35, 565-574, 2009.

Chantel S. Prat, Brianna L. Yamasaki, Jose M. Ceballos & Roy Seo (Department of Psychology & Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, University of Washington)

csprat@uw.edu

individual differences; inhibition; executive functioning; bilingualism; language similarity; language use

Language is one of the most complex feats of the human mind and brain, involving the retrieval and manipulation of symbols to produce a nearly infinite set of communicative structures. Bilingualism greatly increases these demands, as two sets of symbols, and two sets of rules for manipulating them, must be “managed” in one brain. Much research has been devoted to measuring the broader implications that these demands have for bilingual cognition. For example, a plethora of research has shown that bilinguals exhibit superior inhibitory control to monolinguals, suggesting that the additional demands associated with bilingual language control train general executive processes (see Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2012 for a review). Recently, however, these findings have been called into question (e.g., Paap & Greenberg, 2013). We argue that an improved understanding of the facets of bilingualism that likely drive the neurocognitive demands associated with bilingual language control (e.g., language similarity and language use habits) should be central to this research, as it has been widely acknowledged that bilingualism is not a dichotomous variable. In the current experiment, we investigated individual differences in inhibitory control in a total of 423 individuals with bilingual backgrounds. Participants were included if they indicated having experience with two or more languages on a language history questionnaire. Data from the same version of a Simon Task were pooled from three investigations of executive functioning. The Simon Effect (a metric of inhibitory control) was indexed by subtracting incongruent reaction times (RTs) and accuracies from congruent ones, although all significant results were from RT indexes. The primary independent variables of interest were linguistic distance (Chiswick & Miller, 2005), and current language usage, calculated as the percentage of time over the past month that participants used their dominant language (lower numbers indicate more balanced bilinguals). We also correlated second language (L2) age of acquisition and proficiency with inhibitory control. The results showed that linguistic distance was correlated with the Simon Effect, [r(191) = .32, p < .001], suggesting that individuals who speak languages that are distantly related have better inhibitory control. Additionally, language use was positively correlated with the Simon Effect, [r(423) = .114, p = .019], suggesting that individuals who use both languages regularly have better inhibitory control. Finally, both age of L2 acquisition and L2 proficiency significantly correlated with the Simon Effect [r(268) = .15 and -.14 respectively, ps = .018 and .025 respectively), with early and more proficient bilinguals exhibiting better inhibitory control. The results of this exploratory analysis demonstrate the importance of not treating bilingualism as a homogeneous category, and highlight the significance of two largely understudied features, language similarity and language use, on indices of inhibitory control.

References

[1] Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I., & Luk, G. Bilingualism: consequences for mind and brain. Trends in cognitive sciences, 16(4), 240-250, 2012.

[2] Paap, K. R., & Greenberg, Z. I. There is no coherent evidence for a bilingual advantage in executive processing. Cognitive Psychology, 66(2), 232-258, 2013.

[3] Chiswick, B. R., & Miller, P. W. Linguistic distance: A quantitative measure of the distance between English and other languages. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 26(1), 1-11, 2005.

Kenneth Paap (SFSU), Morgan Bockelman (SFSU), Hunter Johnson (SFSU), Eugene Eusebio (SFSU), Sarah Wagner (SFSU), Angel Avalos (SFSU), & Oliver Sawi (University of Connecticut)

kenp@sfsu.edu

Bilingualism; Switching; Execution Functions; Verbal Fluency

Two hundred SFSU students (55% bilingual) completed three standard switching tasks: color-shape, letter-number, and living-size. We replicated Friedman, et al.’s [1] report of significant correlations between the switching costs derived from each task, thus verifying that the three tasks show convergent validity as measures of switching ability. The substantial level of convergent validity felicitously contrasts with the dismal levels of convergent validity for common measures of inhibitory control [2]. This sets the stage for a strong and compelling test for bilingual advantages in executive functioning (EF) as advocated by Paap and Greenberg [3] in that multiple measures of the same component of EF (switching in this case) can be derived for both language groups. If the results are consistent across the tasks this severely attenuates the chances that they are task specific.   There were no differences between the groups of bilinguals and monolinguals in any of the three tasks for either mixing costs (mean RT on the repeat trials of the mixed block minus mean RT in the pure single-task blocks) or switching costs (mean RT on switch trials minus mean RT on repeat trials). These null results contrast with the bilingual advantage in switching costs reported by Prior and MacWhinney [4], but are completely consistent with the null results reported in six recent experiments using large numbers of bilinguals and monolinguals [3, 2, 5]. The cumulative evidence overwhelmingly favors the conclusion that there are no differences between bilinguals and monolinguals in switching ability. Participants also responded to two category fluency probes (musical instruments and vegetables), two verbal fluency probes (“F” and “A”), and two probes to alternate between two categories (e.g., furniture and fruit) and between two letters (e.g., “S” and “T”). Consistent with previous research monolinguals generated more correct responses in these tasks. Of more interest is the new finding that none of these verbal fluency tasks correlate with any of the measures of switching ability. These findings do not align with the clinical and neuroimaging evidence suggesting that verbal ability may be more strongly reflected in category than in letter fluency scores, and that, conversely, executive functioning may be more strongly reflected in letter fluency scores [6].

References

[1] Friedman, N. P, Miyake, A., Young, S. E., Defries, J. C. Corley, R. P., & Hewitt, J. K. Individual differences in executive functions are almost entirely genetic in origin. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 137(2), 201-225, 2008

[2] Paap, K. R., & Sawi, O. Bilingual advantages in executive functioning: problems in convergent validity, discriminant validity, and the identification of the theoretical construcs. Frontiers in Psychology, 5:962, 1-15, 2014.

[3] Paap, K. R., & Greenberg, Z. There is no coherent evidence for a bilingual advantage in executive processing. Cognitive Psychology, 66, 232-258, 2013.

[4] Prior, A., & MacWhinney, B. A bilingual advantage in task switching. Bilingualism, 13, 253-262, 2010.

[5] Hernández M., Martin, C. D., Barceló, F., & Costa, A.   Where is the bilingual advantage in task-switching? Journal of Memory and Language, 69, 257-276, 2013.

[6] Shao, Z., Janse, E., Visser, K., & Meyer, A. S. What do verbal fluency tasks measure? Predictors of verbal fluency performance in older adults. Frontiers in Psychology, 5:772, 1-10, 2014.