The Bilingual Advantage

Abstract

The existence of a bilingual advantage in executive functions is widely debated in psychological research, with a body of research both supporting and contradicting the phenomenon. Recent reviews of the literature have advocated for a more robust framework to be employed to understand why the findings have been inconsistent. The present study contributed to this research gap by examining the effects of bilingualism through Bialystok and Craik’s (2022) proposed attentional control framework. Specifically, the study investigated attention and working memory under greater attentional control demands, aimed to answer the research question; is there a difference in bilinguals and monolinguals attentional control and working memory?

The study hypothesised that bilingual participants would show an advantage over monolinguals. The criteria for the bilingual  participants was a self-reported language proficiency of B2 or higher on a modified Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) scale. The monolingual (N=29) and bilingual (N=34) participants were tested using the Eriksen Flanker task for attention and the N-back task for working memory. The study did not observe any significant advantage for bilingual participants. The generalisability of these results is limited due to a small sample size. This study contributes to previous research that opposes the effects of bilingualism on executive functions.