Does the bilingual advantage extend to trilingualism?

ABSTRACT

This study examined whether the proposed bilingual advantage in inhibitory control and working memory can be extended to a trilingual advantage, and assessed any age-related effects on a continuum in young adults to older adults. Trilinguals, bilinguals and monolinguals’ performance on the Simon task and a numerical version of the N-back task was compared. On the Simon task, there was no language group difference observed, although the data show an age-related decline in inhibitory control only in trilinguals, but not in bilinguals or monolinguals. No clear language group differences were observed between trilinguals and bilinguals on the N-back task, however an overall trilingual and bilingual disadvantage, compared to monolinguals, was observed. Together the results suggest that managing two or three languages, compared to just one, may have a negative impact on inhibitory control and working memory performance. Importantly, they highlight the need to control for a possible confounding effect of including trilinguals/multilinguals in bilingual cohorts and to ensure that participants in monolingual cohorts speak only one language.

KEYWORDS:

• Ageing
• bilingual advantage
• inhibitory control
• trilingualism
• working memory

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all the participants for taking part in the study. Thanks also go to Dr. Giovanni Ottoboni for help with construction of the Simon paradigm and to Dr. Paul Morrill for help constructing the tests specifically for this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.