Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-04T21:44:58.917Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The impact of bilingualism on the executive control and orienting networks of attention*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2010

MIREIA HERNÁNDEZ ,
ALBERT COSTA ,
LUIS J. FUENTES ,
ANA B. VIVAS  and
NÚRIA SEBASTIÁN-GALLÉS
MIREIA HERNÁNDEZ
Affiliation:
Departament de Psicologia Bàsica, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
ALBERT COSTA*
Affiliation:
ICREA & Departament de Tecnologies de la Informació i les Comunicacions, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
LUIS J. FUENTES
Affiliation:
Universidad de Murcia, Spain
ANA B. VIVAS
Affiliation:
City Liberal Studies: Affiliated Institution of the University of Sheffield, Thessaloniki, Greece
NÚRIA SEBASTIÁN-GALLÉS
Affiliation:
Departament de Tecnologies de la Informació i les Comunicacions, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
*
Address for correspondence: Albert Costa, Universitat Pompeu Fabra – Dept. Technology (1st floor), C. Roc Boronat 138, Barcelona 08018, SPAIN [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to provide new evidence regarding the impact of bilingualism on the attentional system. We approach this goal by assessing the effects of bilingualism on the executive and orienting networks of attention. In Experiment 1, we compared young bilingual and monolingual adults in a numerical version of the Stroop task, which allowed the assessment of the executive control network. We observed more efficient performance in the former group, which showed both reduced Stroop Interference and larger Stroop Facilitation Effects relative to the latter. Conversely, Experiment 2, conducted with a visual cueing task in order to assess the orienting network, revealed similar Cueing Facilitation and Inhibition (Inhibition of Return – IOR) Effects for both groups of speakers. The implications of the results of these two experiments for the origin and boundaries of the bilingual impact on the attentional system are discussed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , July 2010 , pp. 315 - 325
Creative Commons
This is a work of the U.S. Government and is not subject to copyright protection in the United States.
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010. This is a work of the U.S. Government and is not subject to copyright protection in the United States.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This research was supported by three grants from the Spanish Government (SEJ-2005/SEJ2005-01223/CONSOLIDER-INGENIO) and grants PSIC and PSI2008-00464/PSIC, as well as by the “ICREA Academia” prize for excellence in research awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya to N.S.G. Mireia Hernández was supported by a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Catalan Government. The authors are grateful to Dr. Bialystok, Ms. Ivanova and Ms. Aalia Chatur for their comments on previous versions of this manuscript.

References

Abutalebi, J. & Green, D. (2007). Bilingual language production: The neurocognition of language representation and control. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 20, 242–275.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Abutalebi, J. & Green, D. (2008). Control mechanisms in bilingual language production: Neural evidence from language switching studies. Language and Cognitive Processes, 23 (4), 557–582.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barceló, F. (2003). The Madrid card sorting test (MCST): A task switching paradigm to study executive attention with event-related potentials. Brain Research Protocols, 11, 27–37.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E. (2006). Effect of bilingualism and computer video game experience on the Simon task. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 60 (1), 68–79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M., Grady, C., Chau, W., Ishii, R., Gunji, A. et al. (2005b). Effect of bilingualism on cognitive control in the Simon task: Evidence from MEG. NeuroImage, 24, 40–49.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M., Klein, R. & Viswanathan, M. (2004). Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: Evidence from the Simon task. Psychology and Aging, 19, 290–303.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M. & Luk, G. (2008). Cognitive control and lexical access in younger and older bilinguals. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34 (4), 859–873.Google ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E., Martin, M. M. & Viswanathan, M. (2005a). Bilingualism across the lifespan: The rise and fall of inhibitory control. International Journal of Bilingualism, 9 (1), 103–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Callejas, A., Lupiáñez, J., Funes, M. J. & Tudela, P. (2005). Modulations among the alerting, orienting and executive control networks. Experimental Brain Research 167, 27–37.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Callejas, A., Lupiáñez, J. & Tudela, P. (2004). The three attentional networks: On its independence and interactions. Brain and Cognition, 54, 225–227.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Colzato, L. S., Bajo, M. T., van den Wildenberg, W., Paolieri, D., Nieuwenhuis, S., La Heij, W. & Hommel, B. (2008). How does bilingualism improve executive control? A comparison of active and reactive inhibition mechanisms. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34 (2), 302–312.Google ScholarPubMed
Costa, A. & Caramazza, A. (1999). Is lexical selection in bilingual speech production language-specific? Further evidence from Spanish–English and English–Spanish bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2, 231–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Costa, A., Hernández, M., Costa-Faidella, J. & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2009). On the bilingual advantage in conflict processing: Now you see it, now you don't. Cognition, 113, 135–149.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Costa, A., Hernández, M. & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2008). Bilingualism aids conflict resolution: Evidence from the ANT task. Cognition, 106, 59–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Costa, A., Miozzo, M. & Caramazza, A. (1999). Lexical selection in bilinguals: Do words in the bilingual's two lexicons compete for selection? Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 365–397.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Costa, A., Santesteban, M. & Ivanova, I. (2006). How do highly-proficient bilinguals control their lexicalization process? Inhibitory and language-specific selection mechanisms are both functional. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 32, 1057–1074.Google ScholarPubMed
Fan, J., McCandliss, B. D. & Fossella, J. (2005). The activation of attentional networks. NeuroImage, 26, 471–479.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fan, J., McCandliss, B. D., Sommer, T., Raz, A. & Posner, M. I. (2002). Testing the efficiency and independence of attentional networks. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14, 340–347.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Finkbeiner, M., Gollan, T. H. & Caramazza, A. (2006). Lexical access in bilingual speakers: What's the (hard) problem? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9, 153–166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fuentes, L. J. & Campoy, G. (2008). The time course of alerting eVect over orienting in the attention network test. Experimental Brain Research, 185 (4), 667–672.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, C. & Bavelier, D. (2003). Action video game modifies visual selective attention. Nature, 423, 534–537.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Green, D. W. (1986). Control, activation and resource. Brain and Language, 27, 210–223.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Green, D. W. (1998). Mental control of the bilingual lexico-semantic system. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1, 67–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroll, J. F., Bobb, S. C., Misra, M. & Guo, T. (2008). Language selection in bilingual speech: Evidence for inhibitory processes. Acta Psychologica, 128, 416–430.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kroll, J. F., Bobb, S. C. & Wodniecka, Z. (2006). Language selectivity is the exception, not the rule: Arguments against a fixed locus of language selection in bilingual speech. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9 (2), 111–135.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, M. W. & Williams, J. N. (2001). Lexical access in spoken word production by bilinguals: Evidence from the semantic competitor priming paradigm. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 233–248.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lupiáñez, J., Milliken, B., Solano, C., Weaver, B. & Tipper, S. (2001). On the strategic modulation of the time course of facilitation and inhibition of return. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 54A, 753–773.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin-Rhee, M. M. & Bialystok, E. (2008). The development of two types of inhibitory control in monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11 (1), 81–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meuter, R. F. I. & Allport, A. (1999). Bilingual language switching in naming: Asymmetrical costs of language selection. Journal of Memory and Language, 40, 25–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milliken, B., Lupiáñez, J. & Roberts, M. (2003). Orienting in space and time: Joint contributions to exogenous spatial cueing effects. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10 (4), 877–883.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morton, J. B. & Harper, S. N. (2007). What did Simon say? Revisiting the bilingual advantage. Developmental Science, 10 (6), 719–726.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Posner, M. I. & Boies, S. J. (1971) Components of attention. Psychological Review, 78 (5), 391–408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Posner, M. I. & Petersen, S. E. (1990). The attention system of the human brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 13, 25–42.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Raven, J., Raven, J. C. & Court, J. H. (1998). Manual for Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (1998 edn). Oxford: Oxford Psychologists Press.Google Scholar
Roelofs, A. (1998). Lemma selection without inhibition of languages in bilingual speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1, 94–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roelofs, A., van Turennout, M. & Coles, M. G. H. (2006). Anterior cingulate cortex activity can be independent of response conflict in Stroop-like tasks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103 (37), 13884–13889.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ruz, M. & Lupiáñez, J. (2002). A review of Attentional Capture: On its automaticity to endogenous control. Psicológica, 23, 283–309.Google Scholar
Seisdedos, N. (1995). Matrices progresivas de Raven: Escalas: CPM color, SPM general, APM superior. Madrid: TEA.Google Scholar
Simon, J. R. & Rudell, A. P. (1967). Auditory S-R compatibility: The effect of an irrelevant cue on information processing. Journal of Applied Psychology, 51, 300–304.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18, 643–662.CrossRefGoogle Scholar