The ups and downs of bilingualism: A review of the literature on executive control using event-related potentials.

Whether bilingualism enhances executive control (EC) is controversial. This article reviews 24 studies on the bilingual EC effect using event-related potentials (ERPs). It evaluates the evidence based on considerations of neural efficiency, different EC theories, and accounts regarding the locus of the bilingual effect. The review finds some evidence for a positive bilingual impact. This is more consistent for the P3 and response-locked ERPs. Moreover, when considering each component independently, evidence primarily supports a monitoring and secondarily an inhibition locus. Additionally, an N2/ERN (error-related negativity) dissociation (no bilingual N2 effect but positive ERN impact, evident as smaller ERN), coupled with the P3 results, suggest that monitoring may not be the (only) locus of a bilingual effect but (an)other post-monitoring mechanism(s). Attention disengagement also receives some support. Finally, results across studies are largely consistent with the Bilingualism Anterior to Posterior and Subcortical Shift model (BAPSS): Bilingual effects, when found, often manifest as shorter latencies, larger components or wider amplitude effects during earlier (N2, P3) but smaller components or narrower effects during later processing (stimulus-locked negativities and response-locked components). However, this evidence is not unequivocal. Many bilingual-monolingual comparisons reveal null or some suggest negative or opposite to prediction bilingual effects. Second, the scant evidence about which bilingual experiences impact EC is, generally, unclear, while some evidence indicates negative effects. Third, BAPSS is often not confirmed when multiple components are examined within subjects. Finally, this literature is challenged by confounds and small samples. Further research is required to conclude a positive bilingual effect on EC in ERPs.

The Multilingual Picture Database.

The growing interdisciplinary research field of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and up-to-date tools which will allow researchers to answer complex questions, but also expand on languages other than English, which dominates the field. One type of such tools are picture datasets which provide naming norms for everyday objects. However, existing databases tend to be small in terms of the number of items they include, and have also been normed in a limited number of languages, despite the recent boom in multilingualism research. In this paper we present the Multilingual Picture (Multipic) database, containing naming norms and familiarity scores for 500 coloured pictures, in thirty-two languages or language varieties from around the world. The data was validated with standard methods that have been used for existing picture datasets. This is the first dataset to provide naming norms, and translation equivalents, for such a variety of languages; as such, it will be of particular value to psycholinguists and other interested researchers. The dataset has been made freely available.

Resisting attraction: Individual differences in executive control are associated with subject-verb agreement errors in production.

We propose that attraction errors in agreement production (e.g., the key to the cabinets are missing) are related to two components of executive control: working memory and inhibitory control. We tested 138 children aged 10 to 12, an age when children are expected to produce high rates of errors. To increase the potential of individual variation in executive control skills, participants came from monolingual, bilingual, and bidialectal language backgrounds. Attraction errors were elicited with a picture description task in Dutch and executive control was measured with a digit span task, Corsi blocks task, switching task, and attentional networks task. Overall, higher rates of attraction errors were negatively associated with higher verbal working memory and, independently, with higher inhibitory control. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of the role of both working memory and inhibitory control in attraction errors in production. Implications for memory- and grammar-based models are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

The effect of childhood bilectalism and multilingualism on executive control.

Several investigations report a positive effect of childhood bilingualism on executive control (EC). An issue that has remained largely unexamined is the role of the typological distance between the languages spoken by bilinguals. In the present study we focus on children who grow up with Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek, two closely related varieties that differ from each other on all levels of language analysis (vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar). We compare the EC performance of such bilectal children to that of English-Greek multilingual children in Cyprus and Standard Modern Greek-speaking monolingual children in Greece. A principal component analysis on six indicators of EC revealed two distinct factors, which we interpreted as representing working memory and inhibition. Multilingual and bilectal children exhibited an advantage over monolinguals that was evident across EC factors and emerged only after statistically controlling for their lower language proficiency. These results demonstrate that similar EC advantages as previously reported for 'true' bilingual speakers can be found in bilectal children, which suggests that minimal typological distance between the varieties spoken by a child suffices to give rise to advantages in EC. They further indicate that the effect of speaking more than one language or dialect on EC performance is located across the EC system without a particular component being selectively affected. This has implications for models of the locus of the bilingual advantage in EC performance. Finally, they show that the emergence of EC advantages in bilinguals is moderated by the level of their language proficiency.