Bilingualism and executive functioning: language experience as more than a binary variable.

One side of the argument claims that certain bilingual experiences lead to practice and therefore improvement in executive control. Others draw attention to a possible publication bias, a recent series of null results and the large-scale variance within bilingual populations. <br><br>The current work sought to further examine the bilingual advantage and the circumstances under which it may become apparent.

Bilingual and monolingual performance on a series of inhibitory control and set shifting tasks, including a novel response switching task, were compared across four studies. Emphasis has been placed on the importance of bilingual background variables, such as 2nd language ability and age of acquisition, and these were included alongside multiple measures of daily language switching habits and linguistic distance. <br><br>Results were largely null, with some monolingual advantages becoming apparent in stop signal and colour shape tasks.