An Investigation of the Multilingual and Bi-dialectal Advantage in Executive Control
Date Issued
January 1, 2020
Author(s)
Abstract
We examined the effect of speaking more than one language (multilingualism) or two dialects of the same language (bi-dialectalism) on executive control (EC) by administering seven EC tasks to 46 multilingual, 72 bi-dialectal and 47 monolingual young adults. We used the EC model of Miyake, Friedman, Emerson, Witzki, Howerter and Wager (2000) according to which EC comprises three components: working memory, task-switching and inhibition. We also tested two theoretical views regarding the locus of the bilingual advantage: first, that bilingualism affects specific EC components and, second, that bilingualism has a more general effect on the whole EC network. Miyake et al.'s (2000) model was a good fit to our EC data. We also found that both multilinguals and bi-dialectals had significantly higher EC scores than monolinguals. Moreover, both the multilingual and the bi-dialectal advantage was found in overall EC ability and could not be attributed to a specific EC component.