Executive control in older Welsh monolinguals and bilinguals

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive aging
• cognitive reserve
• inhibition
• response conflict
• working memory

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.

Additional information

Funding

The BANC study was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [RES-062-23-1931] to Linda Clare (CI), John Hindle, Fergus Craik, Ellen Bialystok, Chris Whitaker, Enlli Thomas and Virginia Gathercole.