The Inhibitory Advantage in Bilingual Children Revisited

TLDR

Bilingual children have been proposed to possess enhanced inhibitory control, but recent studies question the existence and scope of this bilingual advantage. This study examined whether bilingual children outperform monolingual peers on inhibitory tasks. Researchers assessed 252 matched monolingual and bilingual children on a verbal Stroop task and a nonverbal number‑size congruency task. Results showed no significant differences between groups across all indices, age ranges, or task conditions, indicating no bilingual advantage in simple inhibitory tasks.

Abstract

In recent decades several authors have suggested that bilinguals exhibit enhanced cognitive control as compared to monolinguals and some proposals suggest that this main difference between monolinguals and bilinguals is related to bilinguals’ enhanced capacity of inhibiting irrelevant information. This has led to the proposal of the so-called bilingual advantage in inhibitory skills. However, recent studies have cast some doubt on the locus and generality of the alleged bilingual advantage in inhibitory skills. In the current study we investigated inhibitory skills in a large sample of 252 monolingual and 252 bilingual children who were carefully matched on a large number of indices. We tested their performance in a verbal Stroop task and in a nonverbal version of the same task (the number size-congruency task). Results were unequivocal and showed that bilingual and monolingual participants performed equally in these two tasks across all the indices or markers of inhibitory skills explored. Furthermore, the lack of differences between monolingual and bilingual children extended to all the age ranges tested and was not modulated by any of the independent factors investigated. In light of these results, we conclude that bilingual children do not exhibit any specific advantage in simple inhibitory tasks as compared to monolinguals.