No compelling evidence for a bilingual advantage in switching or that frequent language switching reduces switch cost |
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| Authors: | Kenneth R Paap Hunter A Myuz Regina T Anders Morgan F Bockelman Roman Mikulinsky Oliver M Sawi |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Psychology, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA;2. Department of Psychology, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, USA;3. Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA |
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| Abstract: | Participants completed three cued-switching tasks, responded to two category-fluency probes, two letter-fluency probes, and two probes to alternate between two targets. Correlations across the three cued-switching tasks were significant for both switching costs and mixing costs. The bilingual advantage hypothesis was tested both by forming language groups and treating bilingualism as a continuous variable. No bilingual advantages were observed. In verbal-fluency monolinguals generated more correct responses but the bilingual disadvantage on the category task was not reduced in the letter-fluency scores. The bilingual disadvantage was eliminated when the groups were matched on vocabulary size. The verbal-fluency measures obtained when participants alternated between targets weakly correlated with the switching-costs obtained in the cued-switching tasks. |
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| Keywords: | Language switching executive function bilingualism switching cost verbal fluency |
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