There is no coherent evidence for a bilingual advantage in executive processing.

doi:10.1016/J.COGPSYCH.2012.12.002

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There is no coherent evidence for a bilingual advantage in executive processing.

Journal Article•DOI•

There is no coherent evidence for a bilingual advantage in executive processing.

Kenneth R. Paap¹, Zachary I. Greenberg¹•Institutions (1)

San Francisco State University¹

01 Mar 2013-Cognitive Psychology (Cogn Psychol)-Vol. 66, Iss: 2, pp 232-258

TL;DR: A problem reconfirmed by the present study is that effects assumed to be indicators of a specific executive process in one task frequently do not predict individual differences in that same indicator on a related task, which undermines the interpretation that these are valid indicators of domain-general abilities.

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About: This article is published in Cognitive Psychology.The article was published on 2013-03-01. It has received 849 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Task analysis.

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Book•

Handbook of Psycholinguistics

[...]

Morton Ann Gernsbacher

28 Apr 2011

TL;DR: The authors, The Neuropsychology of language and its relationship with the human brain: A Guide to Research on the Perception of Speech and its Implications for Research and Theory, The authors.

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Abstract: K. Haberlandt, Methods in Reading Research. F. Ferreira and M. Anes, Why Study Spoken Language? K. Rayner and S.C. Sereno, Eye Movements in Reading Psycholinguistic Studies. M. Kutas and C.K. Van Petten, Psycholinguistics Electrified: Event-Related Brain Potential Investigations. R.E. Remez, A Guide to Research on the Perception of Speech. K.R. Kluender, Speech Perception as a Tractable Problem in Cognitive Science. D.W. Massaro, Psychological Aspects of Speech Perception: Implications for Research and Theory. S.E. Lively, D.B. Pisoni, and S.D. Goldinger, Spoken Word Recognition: Research and Theory. D.A. Balota, Visual Word Recognition: The Journey from Features to Meaning. G.B. Simpson, Context and the Processing of Ambiguous Words. D.C. Mitchell, Sentence Parsing. R.W. Gibbs, Jr., Figurative Thought and Figurative Language. C. Cacciari and S. Glucksberg, Understanding Figurative Language. M. Singer, Discourse Inference Processes. A.C. Graesser, C.L. McMahen, and B.K. Johnson, Question Asking and Answering. P. van den Broek, Comprehension and Memory of Narrative Texts: Inferences and Coherence. C.R. Fletcher, Levels of Representation in Memory for Discourse. A.M. Glenberg, P. Kruley, and W.E. Langston, Analogical Processes in Comprehension: Simulation of a Mental Model. B.K. Britton, Understanding Expository Text: Building Mental Structures to Induce Insights. S.C. Garrod and A.J. Sanford, Resolving Sentences in a Discourse Context: How Discourse Representation Affects Language Understanding. A.J. Sanford and S.C. Garrod, Selective Processing in Text Understanding. W. Kintsch, The Psychology of Discourse Processing. P. Bloom, Recent Controversies in the Study of Language Acquisition. L. Gerken, Child Phonology: Past Research, Present Questions, Future Directions. J. Oakhill, Individual Differences in Children's Text Comprehension. C.A. Perfetti, Psycholinguistics and Reading Ability. R.K. Olson, Language Deficits in Specific Reading Disability. K. Kilborn, Learning a Language Late: Second Language Acquisition in Adults. K. Bock and W. Levelt, Language Production: Grammatical Encoding. H.H. Clark, Discourse in Production. D. Caplan, Language and the Brain. E. Zurif and D. Swinney, The Neuropsychology of Language. P.A. Carpenter, A. Miyake, and M.A Just, Working Memory Constraints in Comprehension: Evidence from Individual Differences, Aphasia, and Aging. A. Garnham, Future Directions. Index.

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1,926 citations

Journal Article•DOI•

Bilingual advantages in executive functioning either do not exist or are restricted to very specific and undetermined circumstances.

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Kenneth R. Paap¹, Hunter A. Johnson¹, Oliver Sawi²•Institutions (2)

San Francisco State University¹, University of Connecticut²

01 Aug 2015-Cortex

TL;DR: The hypothesis that managing two languages enhances general executive functioning is examined and the cumulative effect of confirmation biases and common research practices has created a belief in a phenomenon that does not exist or has inflated the frequency and effect size of a genuine phenomenon.

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559 citations

Additional excerpts

...The convergent validity across these measures of monitoring has been examined in the three studies conducted by Paap and Greenberg (2013) and a fourth study reported in Paap and Sawi (2014)....
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...…conditions where the proportion of incongruent trials is .5, three additional experiments have failed to produce any bilingual advantages in the flanker effect in any of the three blocks (Costa, Hern andez, Costa-Faidella, & Sebasti an-Gall es, 2009; Paap & Greenberg, 2013; Paap & Sawi, 2014)....
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...Studies that include this control frequently do not show a bilingual advantage (e.g., Luk, et al., 2011; Paap & Greenberg, 2013; Paap & Sawi, 2014)....
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...One possible roadmap for pursuing the specific circumstances for producing bilingual advantages was provided by Paap and Greenberg (2013) and could stand to be updated....
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Journal Article•DOI•

The Bilingual Adaptation: How Minds Accommodate Experience

[...]

Ellen Bialystok¹•Institutions (1)

York University¹

01 Mar 2017-Psychological Bulletin

TL;DR: Although most of the research discussed in the review reports some relation between bilingualism and cognitive or brain outcomes, several areas of research largely fail to show these effects and an account based on "executive attention" is proposed to explain the range of research findings.

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Abstract: According to some estimates, more than half of the world's population is multilingual to some extent. Because of the centrality of language use to human experience and the deep connections between linguistic and nonlinguistic processing, it would not be surprising to find that there are interactions between bilingualism and cognitive and brain processes. The present review uses the framework of experience-dependent plasticity to evaluate the evidence for systematic modifications of brain and cognitive systems that can be attributed to bilingualism. The review describes studies investigating the relation between bilingualism and cognition in infants and children, younger and older adults, and patients, using both behavioral and neuroimaging methods. Excluded are studies whose outcomes focus primarily on linguistic abilities because of their more peripheral contribution to the central question regarding experience-dependent changes to cognition. Although most of the research discussed in the review reports some relation between bilingualism and cognitive or brain outcomes, several areas of research, notably behavioral studies with young adults, largely fail to show these effects. These discrepancies are discussed and considered in terms of methodological and conceptual issues. The final section proposes an account based on "executive attention" to explain the range of research findings and to set out an agenda for the next steps in this field. (PsycINFO Database Record

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509 citations

Cites methods or result from "There is no coherent evidence for a..."

...These results, however, were more precarious than those found for children and sometimes were not found for young adults (e.g., Bialystok et al., 2005a; Paap & Greenberg, 2013) or emerged only for the most complex conditions (e.g., Costa et al., 2009)....
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...Finally, as Paap and colleagues frequently noted (e.g., Paap & Greenberg, 2013), there was little correlation across various executive function tasks....
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...The first of the recent studies of this type was conducted by Paap and Greenberg (2013)....
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Journal Article•DOI•

Understanding the consequences of bilingualism for language processing and cognition

[...]

Judith F. Kroll¹, Ellen Bialystok²•Institutions (2)

Pennsylvania State University¹, York University²

25 Aug 2013-Journal of cognitive psychology

TL;DR: It is argued that the tendency to consider bilingualism as a unitary phenomenon explained in terms of simple component processes has created a set of apparent controversies that masks the richness of the central finding in this work: the adult mind and brain are open to experience in ways that create profound consequences for both language and cognition.

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Abstract: Contemporary research on bilingualism has been framed by two major discoveries. In the realm of language processing, studies of comprehension and production show that bilinguals activate information about both languages when using one language alone. Parallel activation of the two languages has been demonstrated for highly proficient bilinguals as well as second language learners and appears to be present even when distinct properties of the languages themselves might be sufficient to bias attention towards the language in use. In the realm of cognitive processing, studies of executive function have demonstrated a bilingual advantage, with bilinguals outperforming their monolingual counterparts on tasks that require ignoring irrelevant information, task switching, and resolving conflict. Our claim is that these outcomes are related and have the overall effect of changing the way that both cognitive and linguistic processing are carried out for bilinguals. In this article we consider each of these domains of bilingual performance and consider the kinds of evidence needed to support this view. We argue that the tendency to consider bilingualism as a unitary phenomenon explained in terms of simple component processes has created a set of apparent controversies that masks the richness of the central finding in this work: the adult mind and brain are open to experience in ways that create profound consequences for both language and cognition.

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473 citations

Cites background from "There is no coherent evidence for a..."

...An illustration of this problem can be seen in the recent paper by Paap and Greenberg (2013) in which they call into question all evidence for bilingual advantages in executive function....
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...…review of the literature on bilingualism and executive control, Hilchey and Klein (2011) assemble evidence from studies showing no bilingual advantage on simple inhibition tasks and then use that result to discredit the entire body of work (see also Paap & Greenberg, 2013, for a similar argument)....
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Journal Article•DOI•

Cognitive Advantage in Bilingualism An Example of Publication Bias

[...]

Angela de Bruin¹, Barbara Treccani², Sergio Della Sala¹•Institutions (2)

University of Edinburgh¹, University of Sassari²

01 Jan 2015-Psychological Science

TL;DR: Looking at conference abstracts from 1999 to 2012 on the topic of bilingualism and executive control found studies with results fully supporting the bilingual-advantage theory were most likely to be published, followed by studies with mixed results.

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Abstract: It is a widely held belief that bilinguals have an advantage over monolinguals in executive-control tasks, but is this what all studies actually demonstrate? The idea of a bilingual advantage may result from a publication bias favoring studies with positive results over studies with null or negative effects. To test this hypothesis, we looked at conference abstracts from 1999 to 2012 on the topic of bilingualism and executive control. We then determined which of the studies they reported were subsequently published. Studies with results fully supporting the bilingual-advantage theory were most likely to be published, followed by studies with mixed results. Studies challenging the bilingual advantage were published the least. This discrepancy was not due to differences in sample size, tests used, or statistical power. A test for funnel-plot asymmetry provided further evidence for the existence of a publication bias.

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448 citations

Cites background from "There is no coherent evidence for a..."

...Some of these studies have been published (e.g., Gathercole et al., 2014; Paap & Greenberg, 2013), but we suspected that many other studies of this nature have not....
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G*Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences

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Akira Miyake¹, Naomi P. Friedman¹, Michael J. Emerson¹, Alexander H. Witzki¹, Amy Howerter¹, Tor D. Wager² - Show less +2 more•Institutions (2)

University of Colorado Boulder¹, University of Michigan²

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TL;DR: The results suggest that it is important to recognize both the unity and diversity ofExecutive functions and that latent variable analysis is a useful approach to studying the organization and roles of executive functions.

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12,182 citations

Additional excerpts

...The question of convergent validity for alternative measures of the monitoring component deserves additional investigation given the ambiguity of the present results and the fact that monitoring was not included as a separate latent variable in the Miyake and Friedman studies....
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...Friedman et al. (2008) point out that the individual difference correlations in interference tasks are usually low and seem sensitive to task variations....
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...At first look this may appear puzzling since the nature of the inhibition required in the three tasks used by Friedman et al. (antisaccade, stop signal, and Stroop) appears to be as varied, if not more so, than the type of inhibition required across the Simon, flanker, and Stroop tasks....
[...]
...Table 10 shows the reliability of each of our indicators based on block-to-block correlations adjusted by the Spearman–Brown prophecy formula.13 As shown in Table 9 all the correlations 13 This is consistent with the reliability measures for the antisaccade and color-shape switching tasks reported by Friedman et al. (2008) in their seminal article on individual differences in EP....
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...3 Miyake and Friedman did not include the monitoring component per se in their studies, but suggest that it could be considered a subcomponent of both switching and updating....
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Cornell University¹

01 Apr 2002-Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

TL;DR: A study with 40 normal adult subjects indicates that the ANT produces reliable single subject estimates of alerting, orienting, and executive function, and further suggests that the efficiencies of these three networks are uncorrelated.

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Abstract: In recent years, three attentional networks have been defined in anatomical and functional terms. These functions involve alerting, orienting, and executive attention. Reaction time measures can be used to quantify the processing efficiency within each of these three networks. The Attention Network Test (ANT) is designed to evaluate alerting, orienting, and executive attention within a single 30-min testing session that can be easily performed by children, patients, and monkeys. A study with 40 normal adult subjects indicates that the ANT produces reliable single subject estimates of alerting, orienting, and executive function, and further suggests that the efficiencies of these three networks are uncorrelated. There are, however, some interactions in which alerting and orienting can modulate the degree of interference from flankers. This procedure may prove to be convenient and useful in evaluating attentional abnormalities associated with cases of brain injury, stroke, schizophrenia, and attention-deficit disorder. The ANT may also serve as an activation task for neuroimaging studies and as a phenotype for the study of the influence of genes on attentional networks.

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