Group Differences in Conflict Processing Between Bilinguals and Monolinguals

Group Differences in Conflict Processing Between Bilinguals and Monolinguals

Alvin Sherman Library

There is an ongoing debate in the literature on the existence of a bilingual advantage on tests of attention. Hypothetically, bilinguals have an advantage over monolinguals on tests of attention because both attention and language control share the same inhibitory mechanism. Because bilinguals engage this mechanism more often than monolinguals, inhibitory control is believed to be stronger and confer an advantage. However, research findings on the bilingual advantage are inconsistent and attempts to reproduce prior results have sometimes failed. The argument is that studies may have failed to capture the important aspects of language linked to attention. Prior research from our laboratory revealed that linguistic balance, not the bilingual/monolingual classification, was linked to neural activity and performance. The goal of our current ongoing study is to replicate and extend prior findings. As in prior studies, we use the Bilingual Verbal Ability Test to quantify linguistic balance. To test attention, we administer the Stroop, Flanker, and Simon Squared tasks. The Squared tasks use four conditions to test the participant's cognitive control: 1) fully congruent, both stimulus and response are congruent; 2) fully incongruent, neither the stimulus nor the response are congruent; 3) stimulus congruent with response incongruent; 4) stimulus incongruent with response congruent. These measures can tell us about a participant's ability to control their attention to relevant information while ignoring attention-capturing but irrelevant information. Based on prior findings, we predict that linguistic balance will be negatively related to performance. That is, monolinguals will outperform less balanced bilinguals, and less balanced bilinguals will outperform more balanced bilinguals.