Presentation

Ariane Senécal¹, Leah Gosselin¹, Laura Sabourin¹; ¹University of Ottawa

In psycholinguistics, a thorny debate concerns the impact of individuals’ language background on their cognitive abilities. Many studies (e.g., Bialystok et al., 2012) suggest that bilingualism could confer certain advantages for the brain’s executive functions—particularly those related to ‘cognitive control’, the general ability to focus on goal-relevant information and filter out irrelevant details (Morton et al., 2011). The contested hypothesis is that these ‘bilingual advantages’ result from the regular shifting of language modes: according to context, bilinguals must alternately activate their appropriate language and suppress their irrelevant language. Under this perspective, it may be asked whether plurilinguals (i.e., speakers of two or more languages) display additional or enhanced cognitive advantages compared to bilinguals, as they must inhibit two or more languages simultaneously when activating another. Unfortunately, in studies investigating language-related cognitive advantages, plurilinguals are usually collapsed with bilinguals or outright excluded from the sample. As such, the current pilot project explored the data of participants rejected from an online experiment studying cognitive control among French-English bilinguals (Gosselin & Sabourin, in prep) as they possessed various third (or more) languages. We compared these 22 plurilinguals with 22 randomly selected bilinguals retained for the larger study. The groups were matched for age, education, video-gaming habits, age of exposure to English/French, current proficiency in English/French, percentage of time spent in unilingual-mode, and code-switching habits (all ps>.11). Participants completed two inhibitory control tasks: a non-linguistic Flanker task and a French-English bilingual adaptation of the linguistic Stroop task (see Sabourin & Vīnerte, 2015). Participants’ cognitive control skills were operationalized by computing facilitation effects (i.e., difference between non-conflict and baseline trials), inhibition effects (i.e., difference between conflict and baseline trials) and global effects (i.e., overall reaction times for all trials) for both tasks. Between-group ANOVAs were conducted on each of these dependent variables. Plurilinguals had faster global reaction times on the Flanker task (F(1, 41)=3.94, p=.054), an advantage of a magnitude of 40.9ms. Descriptively, plurilinguals also displayed smaller inhibition effects than bilinguals (by a magnitude of 11.7ms), but this difference did not reach statistical significance (F(1, 41)=2.12, p=.153). In the Stroop task, there was a trend for plurilinguals to demonstrate larger facilitation effects (F(1, 40)=2.75, p=.105; magnitude of 27.4ms) and smaller inhibition effects (F(1, 40)=2.67, p=.110; magnitude of 39.4ms) for English items, but no such advantages for French items (facilitation: bilinguals=39.7ms, plurilinguals=-5.7ms; inhibition: bilinguals=-26.1ms, plurilinguals=-53.8ms). These preliminary results suggest that plurilinguals may possess domain-general monitoring advantages (i.e., a cognitive ‘readiness’ for all types of trials) relative to their bilingual counterparts; the findings also suggest that plurilinguals may experience better language-specific inhibitory control than bilinguals in at least one of their shared languages. Even though the plurilinguals in the current project possessed diverse language backgrounds, they differed sufficiently from bilinguals for the group to merit closer inspection in future research. A study is currently being initiated to recruit and further examine a more uniform set of plurilinguals. This will allow us to better establish how plurilinguals’ performance compares to that of bilinguals in inhibitory control tasks.

Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Control, Selection, and Executive Processes