What did Simon say? Revisiting the bilingual advantage

Bilingual children often outperform monolingual children in tasks of cognitive control. This advantage may be a consequence of the fact that bilinguals have more practice controlling attention due to an ongoing need to manage two languages. However, existing evidence is limited because possible differences in ethnicity and socioeconomic status have not been properly controlled. To address this issue, we administered the Simon task to bilingual and monolingual children of identical ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Bilingual and monolingual children performed identically, whereas children from higher SES families were advantaged relative to children from lower SES families. Controlling differences in SES and ethnicity may attenuate the bilingual advantage in cognitive control.     

Cross modality facilitation in tachistoscopic word recognition

In its old form, the logogen model (Morton, 1969) would have predicted extensive cross-model facilitation of tachistoscopic word recognition. An experiment by Winnick and Daniel (1970) violated this prediction by showing no effects on subsequent visual word recognition of naming a picture or filling a definition. The latter results was replicated, and it was also found that pretraining with handwritten words transferred to printed words from 10-45 min later. A further experiment showed no significant transfer from auditory presentation to subsequent visual recognition. A third experiment, designed to minimize the role of conscious guessing strategies showed a significant cross-model transfer. The logogen model was modified substantially in the light of these data. There are now seen to be modality specific input categorization systems which are separate from the output lexicon and which are identified as the site of facilitation in the experiments.