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ABSTRACT
Evidence for a bilingual advantage in executive control has led to the suggestion that being bilingual might protect against late-life cognitive decline. We assessed the performance of socially homogeneous groups of older (≥60 years) bilingual Welsh/English (n = 50) and monolingual English (n = 49) speakers on a range of executive control tasks yielding 17 indices for comparison. Effect sizes (>.2) favoured monolinguals on 10 indices, with negligible differences observed on the remaining 7 indices. Univariate analyses indicated that monolinguals performed significantly better on 2 of 17 indices. Multivariate analysis indicated no significant overall differences between the two groups in performance on executive tasks. Older Welsh bilinguals do not show a bilingual advantage in executive control, and where differences are observed, these tend to favour monolinguals. A possible explanation may lie in the nature of the socio-linguistic context and its influence on cognitive processing in the bilingual group.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Lester Bath for administrative support, Dr David Hunnisett for assistance with data management, Dr Zoe Hoare for statistical advice, and Professor Margaret Deuchar for supporting the study. We thank Professor Fergus Craik and Professor Ellen Bialystok for generously sharing their expertise in bilingualism research, for their advice, guidance and support during the BANC project, and for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.