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ABSTRACT
The replicability of findings supporting a bilingual advantage in cognitive control has been questioned lately, with socioeconomic status (SES) and bilingualism type (e.g. early-late, dominant-balanced) as suggested confounding variables. It has lately also been argued that bilingual experience (switch cost asymmetry – SCA between the languages), might correlate with interference control. We further investigated this, with a homogeneous group of 45 young bilingual adults. Participants were carefully matched with 45 Greek-speaking monolinguals on age, gender, SES (mostly low), and non-verbal intelligence, and they were given the Attentional Network Test task and a language-switching task measuring SCA. The factor language group did not interact with congruency or cueing. Finally, conflict resolution did not correlate with SCA. Findings are discussed in relation to the present samples’ characteristics and evidence suggesting an underrepresentation of the bilingual advantage in lower SES bilinguals.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Although, we did not have a large number of trials, we conducted complementary analyses only with the first block of trials (three pairs of participants were not included in the analyses because accuracy was below 70%; N = 84) to rule out the possibility that the bilingual advantage disappeared with practice (Hilchey & Klein, Citation2011). As in the analyses conducted with all three experimental blocks, language group factor did not interact with cue or congruency. The trend for an overall slower response time in the bilingual group (613 ms), relative to the monolingual group (573 ms) was still present, yet not reaching statistical significance any more, p = .089.