Relationship between language switching experience and executive functions in bilinguals: an Internet-based study

Abstract

We examined the relationship between self-reported everyday language switching experience and the performance of early bilinguals in tasks measuring different executive functions. Our participants were Finnish–Swedish early bilinguals, aged 16–41 years (N = 66, Experiment 1) and 18–69 years (N = 111, Experiment 2). An earlier study using a sample from a similar population discovered a negative relationship between self-reported language switching and a mixing cost in error rates in a number–letter task. This finding was not replicated. Instead, we found that a higher rate of reported contextual language switching predicted larger switching cost reaction times in the number–letter task, and that a higher rate of reported unintended language switches predicted larger error rates in a spatial n-back task. We conclude that these results likely reflect individual differences in executive skills, and do not provide evidence for the hypothesis that language switching trains executive functions.