User:Cspel/Cognitive effects of multilingualism

Ideas to update article: read through and clarify academic language to make content more clear, search for meta-analyses to reduce amount of primary sources used.

Executive function section: "Executive function is the domain of high-level cognitive processes that assists in goal-oriented tasks, such as problem solving, mental flexibility, attentional control, inhibitory control, and task switching.[citation needed]"


 * PLAN: add citation for this

Empirical findings section - reduce the amount of citations attributed to single sources/authors


 * PLAN: look for literature review to reference rather than individual articles

Same with "in opposition" section (too many citations of single articles/authors)

Empirical findings[in article currently]
The modern day approach to researching multilingualism is suggesting that there are cognitive advantages to becoming bilingual. One of the more frequently tested aspects to language development has been in relation to a possible link between bilingualism and higher executive functioning skills. In many studies bilingual groups outperformed monolingual control groups in executive function tasks. These findings suggest bilingualism is correlated with better control of attention and facilitates processing and functioning in several cognitive tasks.

There are two types of processing that aid children in language development: analysis, which involves the ability to represent and understand abstract information, and control, which involves the ability to selectively attend to specific aspects of structures whilst ignoring irrelevant information. The aspect of control is linked to the bilingual effect on cognitive abilities.

In one study, researchers administered a non-linguistic card-sorting task to participants that required flexibility in problem solving, inhibiting irrelevant information, as well as recognizing the constancy of certain variables in the face of changes in the rules. Bilingual children significantly outperformed their monolingual peers in this task, suggesting early development of inhibitory function that aids solving problems which require the ability to selectively focus attention.

In a following study, researchers aimed to determine what gave bilinguals an advantage in solving the card-sorting task (and generally an advantage in problem solving situations). Groups were equivalent in their ability to represent the stimuli (reflecting Worrall's findings, described below), and both were equally able to inhibit learned motor responses. Bilinguals performed better on the task to measure conceptual inhibition; the ability to inhibit previous associations and create new mental representations of the stimulus according to task changes.

Another study used three language groups: native bilinguals, English monolinguals, and English speakers enrolled in an immersion program. The bilingual children's scores were similar to the other groups despite lower parent socioeconomic and education level and lower verbal scores. When the two groups were adjusted for age, parent income and education, and verbal scores, the bilingual children outperformed monolinguals on conflict tasks that required resolving multiple attention demands.

Also, other studies suggest that late bilinguals outperform their monolingual peers in memory capacity, including phonological short-term memory and visuospatial memory, and that the degree of cognitive enhancement increases as proficiency in the second language grows.

Bogulski, Rakoczy, Goodman, and Bialystok investigated how "lapsed bilinguals" (participants who used to be bilingual but are now monolingual) compared to monolinguals and fluent bilinguals in executive function tasks. The lapsed bilinguals tested better than monolinguals but worse than their fluent counterparts.

Ghil'ad Zuckermann describes several studies that have found that "bilingual children have better non-linguistic cognitive abilities compared with monolingual children (Kovács & Mehler 2009) and improved attention and auditory processing (Krizman et al. 2012: 7879): the bilingual’s ‘enhanced experience with sound results in an auditory system that is highly efficient, flexible and focused in its automatic sound processing, especially in challenging or novel listening conditions’."

Some researchers demonstrate a contextual effect of sociocultural aspects of bilingualism. Others find these effects across various sociolinguistic settings such as comparison groups with bilingual children speaking a second regional and second migrant language or bilingual children of low-income immigrant families and monolingual children of low-income non-immigrant families.

Empirical findings[my proposed changes]

The modern day approach to researching multilingualism is suggesting that there are cognitive advantages to becoming bilingual. One of the more frequently tested aspects to language development has been in relation to a possible link between bilingualism and higher executive functioning skills. In many studies bilingual groups outperformed monolingual control groups in executive function tasks. These findings suggest bilingualism is correlated with better control of attention and facilitates processing and functioning in several cognitive tasks.

Bilingualism has been shown to have positive effects on executive functioning, executive control, and problem-solving skills (Baumgart & Billick 2017). Many of these positive effects are not linguistic-related and include skills such as inhibition, memory, and selective attention. This is seen throughout all stages of development, from childhood to adulthood. There is also evidence that bilingualism helps prevent cognitive decline associated with aging (Baumgart & Billick 2017). (These 4 sentences are all from the same reference, so would use superscript numbers, but after each sentence???). Some research also suggests there are benefits of bilingualism seen specifically during childhood, including non-linguistic cognitive abilities (Kovács & Mehler 2009), attention and auditory processing (Krizman et al. 2012), and metalinguistic and metacognitive awareness in specific bilingual groups (Baumgart & Billick 2017).

Analyses[in article currently]
David Green offered an explanation for this phenomenon with his "inhibitory control model." Proposed in 1998, this model references a bilingual's constant need to suppress one language while using another. Because this task requires suppressing a source of distraction, this kind of control is then applied to other tasks. This assertion was bolstered by a study of unimodal bilinguals (bilinguals who communicated with two spoken languages) and bimodal bilinguals (bilinguals who used one spoken language and sign language). Because bimodal bilinguals can express themselves in both languages at the same time, they may require less inhibition. This idea was supported by the results of the study; only unimodal bilinguals were found to have an advantage, as measured by the flanker task (a cognitive task that measures attentional focus and inhibition). Bimodal bilinguals also switch languages less frequently, because they are more likely to use both languages at once than to completely switch from one to the other. For this reason, the researchers of this study hypothesized that it may be the switching between languages that gives unimodal bilinguals the advantage. Prior and Gollan conducted a study investigating this idea, and found that bilinguals who switched languages often had an advantage in task shifting over bilinguals who did not frequently switch languages. However, this study did not control for similarity between the languages (languages that are more similar might require more attention to keep straight). When Verreyt, Woumans, Vandelanotte, Szmalec, and Duyck ran a similar study but with all participants having the same languages, they replicated the results of Prior and Gallan. Additionally, because their study looked at tasks measuring inhibition even though language switching should directly affect switching tasks, they argued that the effects of language-switching carry over multiple facets of executive control.

Bialystok and others have echoed this idea that the greater ability of bilinguals to selectively attend to important conceptual attributes of a stimulus may stem from the bilinguals' constant need to inhibit competing labels in their two languages for one object according to the currently relevant language. Bilinguals have different representations in each language for similar concepts and therefore need to constantly be aware of which language they are using and what the appropriate word is to be used in that context. This culminates in an advantage of cognitive control, since the ability to switch between languages and select the appropriate word for use is directly linked to the ability to better attend to relevant, or inhibit irrelevant, information. A further explanation refers to bilinguals' unique experience with using two languages in the same modality (spoken), differentiating them from monolingual peers, and requiring them to make the decision about how best to respond to a situation, as well as have better control over what they select.

Analyses[my proposed changes]

Some of this information is redundant, or could be moved to a different section. Completely remove the heading "Analyses" and move relevant info to a more appropriate section and delete what is redundant. Make a new section titled bimodal bilinguals with information re: that specifically and add citations for that.