Is There a Bilingual Advantage in Executive Processing - Coursework Example

Is there a Bilingual Advantage in Executive Processing? Is there a Bilingual Advantage in Executive Processing? Introduction Bilingual and monolingual individuals exhibit different abilities when it comes to executive processing functions. Over the years, researchers have investigated whether or not bilinguals enjoy an advantage over their monolingual counterparts, but the results are still not conclusive. This means that it is yet to be accepted that either entity enjoys an advantage over the other. Although numerous studies have been done on the subject, all inferences are largely debatable thus far. This has left a vacuum that still needs to be filled by conducting more authoritative studies that can inspire a unanimous negative or positive affirmation on the issue. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the current debate by investigating whether or not bilinguals enjoy and advantage in terms of executive functions. Evidence supporting bilingual advantage in executive processing is both inconsistent and inconclusive. Discussion From available materials, most conclusions favour the argument that there is no exclusive benefit to being bilingual. While most studies either support or oppose the thesis statement, some argue that evidence as to whether bilinguals find executive processing easier than others is too limited to provide a definitive inference. Although they are few, they will still be considered in this paper because they provide vital insights into the executive processing debate. Research conducted by Paap and Greenberg (2013) concludes that the results of studies investigating bilingual advantages in executive processing do not reveal explicit and authoritative evidence for the assumption that the bilingualism improves executive processing. According to the researchers, since individual investigations favour the use of only one function and employ only one measure for each executive processing feature, there is often no indicator of convergent validity. In studies that have used numerous functions, there is no evidence of bilingual superiorities and limited or no convergent validity. Some studies show that aligning language categories in issues that affect the development of executive processing is incredibly difficult, and especially challenging when the bilingual category is either bicultural or from a different culture altogether. In addition, the suggestions for a more appropriate and thorough strategy of verifying bilingual dominance in executive processing are obviously difficult (Callahan & Gandara, 2014). The complexity and intricacy of this subject are such that only watertight evidence can be used to make any inferences on whether bilinguals perform better in executive processing than monolinguals. Evidence supporting this hypothesis is weak while evidence contradicting it is both overwhelming and compelling (Pavlenko, 2014). When subjected to rigorous testing and assessments, a majority of them have retained a high threshold of credibility. Other researchers have concluded that they will be unattainable if bilinguals’ unique experiences do not really lead to improvements in executive tasks that are common and domain free. In their research examining whether bilingual children enjoy an edge over monolingual children when it comes to the execution of Attentional Network Tasks (ANTs). Anton et al. (2014) inferred that their findings clearly showed that the putative bilingual advantage was inapplicable in the ANT. This is based on outcomes obtained from a large-enough and comparable group of bilingual and monolingual children. In fact, the researchers go as far as claiming that their results complement an expanding tome of evidence revealing that most types of bilingual advantage in processes examining attention skills could well be inspired by uncontrolled factors. In saying this, the researchers are, in essence, arguing that even if bilinguals have any degree of superiority over monolinguals, such superiority is largely circumstantial (Pavlenko, 2014). As a result, a bilingual child may or may not perform better than monolingual children in executive functions. This should not lead to conclusions that their impressive performances are strictly down to their bilingualism. In other investigations, conclusions have been, surprisingly, that monolingual and bilingual children exhibit similar performances in activities with high executive manipulation thresholds. The notion that bilingual advantages are circumstantial is supported by the argument that if it were truly a consequence of the superior inhibitory abilities of bilinguals, there would a muted conflict effect in them (Schwieter & Ferreira, 2014). This means that there should be smaller disparities between complementary and divergent studies for bilinguals compared to monolinguals. However, this is not the case, and subjects recorded very similar results in spite of their linguistic nature (bilingual or monolingual). In reality, if any ostensible bilingual superiority stemmed from better motor skills, there would be a general disparity in tested groups (Schwieter & Ferreira, 2014). According to research conducted by Anton et al. (2014), the absence of a bilingual superiority in some investigations cannot be linked to a lack of responsiveness to of some research designs to the particular attention networks that could inform such a disparity between bilingual and monolingual individuals (Pavlenko, 2014). Some researchers have also argued that by copying past findings from the monolingual aspect, it is possible to prove that bilingual and monolingual children possess more potential and higher error frequencies in divergent than complimentary experiments. In summary, and irrespective of the statistical authority of current studies, there are no significant disparities between monolingual and bilingual individuals, especially when it comes to the execution of ANT tasks (Schwieter & Ferreira, 2014). Moreover, when adopting the Bayesian perspective to estimate the null hypothesis against the substitute, the null emerges as the dominant candidate. When evaluation is informed by the ROPE strategy, researchers have also found backing for the null hypothesis. Latest studies have revealed limits for the disparities between categories that were even more pronounced than previously cited disparities in adults (Smith & Truscott, 2014). The findings of the study conducted by Anton et al exclusively support the inference that the alleged bilingual dominance in functions concentrating on respondents’ attention skills does not exist or is, at best, extremely erratic and impalpable (Pavlenko, 2014). Neuroimaging and behavioural findings reveal some types of bilingual superiority in identical tasks with adult participants. The occurrence of bilingual superiority in adulthood cannot be dismissed, despite the fact that the extent to which such results can be applied in all adult bilingual respondents is limited. It is important to consider that the alleged bilingual dominance could emerge as a result of prolonged bilingualism, especially in the later years of life. Setting aside the debate on the soundness of the bilingual superiority in attention-related functions in adulthood, what the current findings show is that the disparities highlighted during childhood and adulthood between bilinguals and monolinguals are not visible during childhood (Schwieter & Ferreira, 2014). This, alongside the latest findings revealing larger disparities in older compared to younger respondents, insinuates an extremely variable characteristic of the alleged bilingual superiority, which appears to be heavily reliant on various particular aspects, among which the age of the respondents should be discretely deliberated in future investigations. Bialystok (2009) introduces an entirely different perspective in the debate concerning whether bilinguals actually enjoy an advantage over monolinguals in executive processing. According to her, and this is still open to criticism, it is now common knowledge that bilinguals generally exhibit a smaller vocabulary in each dialect compared to monolinguals. If Bialystok’s assertion is true, it contradicts the widespread assumption that monolinguals’ vocabulary is inferior to bilinguals’. This inference is particularly vital for the profiling of children’s growth because the vocabulary size is an important gauge of children’s development in the verbal and literate variants of language acquisition and development. To an extent, vocabulary size provides an affront for the representational foundation of language that the child is developing, with an elaborate and richer vocabulary representing a more intricate comprehension of language (Schwieter & Ferreira, 2014). Despite this, developmental studies have consistently reported that bilingual children’s vocabularies are more limited in each language compared to their monolingual counterparts. For instance, in an attempt to prove this hypothesis, Bialystok combined the average Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test results of 971 children aged between five and nine years, almost 50 percent of who were bilingual, who had taken part in different studies over a number of years. The overall assessment showed that monolingual children had an average standard mark of 105 while the bilinguals had an average standard score of 95, a disparity that is very crucial. The disparity was seen in children in all the age groups involved in the research, and there was no connection between age and language categories, showing that the vocabulary variation was constant in all participants (Schwieter & Ferreira, 2014). Investigations of access to vocabulary suggest (contrary to popular belief) that bilinguals are slower than monolinguals when it comes to picture naming, scored lower in verbal fluency assignments, have more tip-of-the-tongue encounters, exhibit slower word identification through disturbances, and experience more disruptions in tasks requiring lexical decisions. In all the researches depicting these attributes, there is evidence that part of the challenge stems from the interference that must be addressed from the other dialect (Smith & Truscott, 2014). Although other studies have established (albeit not authoritatively) that there was a correlation between the impacts of aging and word frequency in the sense that older bilinguals exhibited a smaller shortfall for low-frequency words, more studies reveal that the bilingual shortcomings in vocabulary access and retrieval expand with aging. It is not yet clear why bilinguals exhibit difficulties in vocabulary access (Smith & Truscott, 2014). On one hand, the logic is linked to the fact that bilinguals employ each of their dialects less frequently compared to monolinguals. This creates weaker connections among the relevant relations necessary for rapid and coherent speech generation. This rationale borrows heavily from connectionist frameworks in which the links that inform the associative relations between theories and words are spread across two dialects making those links with each dialect less exploited and hence less dynamic (Pavlenko, 2014). This perspective is founded on bilingual speech generation development in which these mnemonic effects are modelled in a connectionist domain. According to Valian (2015), the many studies investigating the effects of bilingualism or different cognitive attributes to executive processing estimate the effects with different functions, and most of these functions are not comprehensive. The majority of tasks (e.g., the Simon) can occur in variations, each of which introduces its own rationales of variability. Without a defined task evaluation that reveals the reasons for the variations across task types and tasks, it is impossible to comprehend the cognitive processes contributing to higher or lower scores in executive processing (Smith & Truscott, 2014). A comparison of the effects of bilingualism with the impacts of other cognitively enhancing processes reveals unclear advantages for all of them. Valian also argues that the advantages of bilingualism in executive processing are particularly erratic for children and young adults. Kousaie et al. (2014) conducted an investigation whose findings showed that bilinguals do not enjoy an advantage in response inhibition functions. There appears to be a bilingual deficit in language activities, including limited vocabularies and challenges with vocabulary access and retrieval. In spite of this, other researchers have established that bilinguals performed (much) better than monolinguals in word frequency that exhibits an executive dimension, but not on class frequency (Smith & Truscott, 2014). In total, the existing evidence shows that bilingualism creates some advantages in executive processing activities and some deficits in language-specific activities (Pavlenko, 2014). After performing a number of experiments on different tasks, Kousaie et al. concluded that the only evidence backing strictly bilingual superiority existed in Stroop interference. However, in language tasks, the inference was that only the evidence from BNT offers limited backing for bilingual disadvantages. In addition, there is no superiority associated with language effects in older generations (Schwieter & Ferreira, 2014). It is important, however, to reflect on these conclusions, which seem to pose more questions instead of settling the debate. Based on the results of the investigation, they inferred that the findings do not validate bilingual advantages or disadvantages in executive processing activities and language tasks accordingly. In Reshaping the mind: the benefits of Bilingualism, Bialystok (2011) states that as of now, the mechanism that creates the bilingual superiority in executive processing and the way in which cognitive reserve guards against the dwindling of cognitive abilities is not understood. More importantly, Bialystok argues that at present, research on this subject is mostly descriptive and exploratory. Although the dynamic possibly functions using a compensatory technique, the details are also hypothetical at this stage. Although she eventually concludes that bilinguals consistently perform better than monolinguals in cognitive functions, the evidence to support this claim is exploratory at best. This paper does not argue that bilinguals do not enjoy an advantage over monolinguals when it comes to executive processing. The primary issue is that few studies have confirmed beyond disrepute that bilingualism indeed creates an advantage in executive processing. In addition, according to results obtained by Kousaie et al. (2014), there is no evidence that the impacts of language are larger in older than younger adults. This study suggests that the language dynamics could have a significant impact on the development of executive processing. In addition, specific languages spoken by individuals could influence the study of language group effect. The bilingual advantage in executive processing is minimal at best (Smith & Truscott, 2014). In fact, in some cases it is even uniquely absent. Some studies have suggested that bilinguals generally perform better than monolinguals in both congruent and incongruent experiments, usually by identical margins (Pavlenko, 2014). When taken in total, these findings insinuate that bilinguals often have an obvious cognitive edge that is possibly visible in a number of cognitive evaluation factors but that, somehow indifferently, is usually not observable in traditional critiques of non-linguistic inhibitory control functions. In many conferences on linguistics and cognitive development, almost 50 percent of findings of studies examining the supposed bilingual advantage in executive processing provide either comprehensive or inconclusive support for the bilingual superiority in specific functions. The other 50 percent provide partial or total opposition to the notion (Smith & Truscott, 2014). It appears that there is a manipulated view of the actual research findings on bilingualism and its supposed advantages, with media and researchers holding that the alleged positive impacts of bilingualism in executive processing are compelling yet uncontested. This paper is not dismissing the argument that bilinguals have an advantage over monolinguals when it comes to executive processing. In fact, some investigations actually show that the superiority exists. However, it is neither widespread nor authoritative as often claimed (Smith & Truscott, 2014). It is premature to conclude that the concept of bilingual advantage in executive processing is fallacious. However, individual studies offer more support to the stance that bilingual advantage is usually overrated and overstated (Smith & Truscott, 2014). The advantage could contradict the manner in which many studies have explained it: as a factor that enables children to enhance their ability to alternate between activities and, more comprehensively, improves their executive processing ability (Schwieter & Ferreira, 2014). The real advantage could occur far later, and in a manner that has little connection with task alternation and executive processing and control. It could be the consequence of basic learning. One of the fields in which bilingual dominance seems to be most visible is not even associated with a specific skill or function. It is simply a general advantage that appears to support the aging brain. For instance, multilingual adults generally appear to withstand the impacts of dementia much better than monolinguals (Rodriguez, Carrasquillo, & Kyung-Soon, 2014). Bialystok’s evaluation of the health records of a number of older adults who had been recommended to health facility in Toronto with mnemonic and other cognitive issues revealed that out of those who ultimately become demented, those who had been bilingual for their entire lives developed symptoms almost 5 years later than lifelong monolinguals. In a later study conducted as a follow-up to Bialystok’s and using a different group of patients who had acquired Alzheimer’s, results showed that in spite of cognitive ability, education or employment history, bilinguals were diagnosed, on average, 4.3 years after monolinguals (Goldrick, Ferreira, & Miozzo, 2014). In other words, bilingualism appears to have a cushioning impact on cognitive decline. This would be compatible with a narrative of learning, because it is accepted that remaining cognitively sharp into old age is a very practical and effective way of preventing the development of dementia or delaying the onset of its symptoms. This is the reason for the increase in crossword puzzles and other cognitively engaging activities that can be sustained by individuals into old age (Goldrick, Ferreira, & Miozzo, 2014). When the brain remains active and is challenged to keep learning, as is the case for most bilinguals, it has a greater capacity to keep operating at a higher degree. This is, in itself, enough justification to become multilingual and to keep mastering languages for as long as one is capable. The bilingual superiority may not manifest in the precise way researcher envisage it currently, but on a basic level, the real advantages of bilingualism in executive processing could be far more significant (Schwieter & Ferreira, 2014). Conclusion The claim that bilingualism creates an advantage in executive processing is flawed, inconsistent, or inconclusive. Of course, there are many studies that have inferred that bilingualism leads to advantages in executive functions. However, when they are subjected to deeper scrutiny, they have failed the test. Some of the findings are authoritative and compelling, but there are still loopholes that need to be sealed before definitive conclusions can be arrived at. It is hard to argue against the fact that bilinguals appear to enjoy, to an extent, an advantage over their monolingual counterparts in executive processing. However, this advantage is not significant enough to support the notion that bilinguals have an outright superiority over monolinguals. Such assumptions feature too many generalisations that are often dismissed once the findings are subjected to thorough examination. On the other hand, the findings of studies that have concluded that bilinguals do not enjoy a significant advantage over monolinguals in executive processing are more credible and consistent. References Anton, E., Dunabeitia, J., Estevez, A., Hernandez, J., Castillo, A., Fuentes, L., . . . Carreiras, M. (2014). Is there a bilingual advantage in the ANT task? Evidence from children. Frontiers in Psychology, 5(398), 1-12. Bialystok, E. (2009). Bilingualism: The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12(1), 3-11. Bialystok, E. (2011). Reshaping the mind: the benefits of bilingualism. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65(4), 229-235. Callahan, R., & Gandara, P. (Eds.). (2014). The bilingual advantage: Language, literacy and the US labor market. New York: Multilingual Matters. Goldrick, M., Ferreira, V., & Miozzo, M. (2014). The Oxford handbook of language production. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paap, K., & Greenberg, Z. (2013). There is no coherent evidence for a bilingual advantage in executive processing. Cognitive Psychology, 66(2), 232-258. Pavlenko, A. (2014). The bilingual mind: And what it tells us about language and thought (Illustrated ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rodriguez, D., Carrasquillo, A., & Kyung-Soon, L. (2014). The bilingual advantage: Promoting academic development, biliteracy, and native language in the classroom. New York: Teachers College Press. Schwieter, J., & Ferreira, A. (Eds.). (2014). The development of translation competence: Theories and methodologies from psycholinguistics and cognitive science. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Smith, M., & Truscott, J. (2014). The multilingual mind: A modular processing perspective (Illustrated ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Valian, V. (2015). Bilingualism and cognition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18(1), 3-24. Bialystok, E. (2011). Reshaping the mind: the benefits of bilingualism. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65(4), 229-235. Read More