It is a temporary memory system that acts as a constantly updated “mental platform” for information relevant for current activities and goals that we are focusing at. One important cognitive domain where the putative BEA has received increasing research interest during the last decade is working memory (WM). After controlling for publication bias, a recent extensive meta-analysis on 152 studies on adults found no systematic support for BEA in any of the six studied executive domains (inhibitory control, set shifting, monitoring, working memory, attention, verbal fluency). The field has also evidenced a publication bias, with null or negative findings being published less often than positive ones. However, the earlier studies supporting the BEA hypothesis have been challenged by several more recent reports that have failed to replicate these findings, and the existence of BEA has been questioned. As bilingual experience varies, e.g., depending on age of acquisition of the second language, language proficiency and time spent using both languages, so may also its effects on executive function. BEA has been assumed to stem from the lifelong experience of managing two languages that requires inhibition of the currently irrelevant language, switching between languages, and monitoring the language context to choose the appropriate target language. Earlier studies appeared to paint a relatively consistent picture where bilinguals performed better than monolinguals on a range of mostly nonverbal tasks calling for executive functions, such as conflict resolution and task switching. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.īilinguals’ possible advantage over monolinguals in executive tasks (bilingual executive advantage, BEA) has been a topic of intensive research interest and growing controversy especially during the past decade. Minna Lehtonen is supported by Academy of Finland (grant #288880). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.įunding: Matti Laine is supported by the Academy of Finland (grant #260276) and the Åbo Akademi University Endowment (the BrainTrain project). Received: ApAccepted: OctoPublished: November 2, 2018Ĭopyright: © 2018 Lukasik et al. PLoS ONE 13(11):Įditor: Barbara Dritschel, University of St Andrews, UNITED KINGDOM Possible reasons for the failure to find support for the BEA hypothesis are discussed.Ĭitation: Lukasik KM, Lehtonen M, Soveri A, Waris O, Jylkkä J, Laine M (2018) Bilingualism and working memory performance: Evidence from a large-scale online study. Moreover, Bayesian analyses did not give consistent support for the BEA hypothesis. In sum, group differences supporting the BEA hypothesis were limited only to the n-back composite, and this composite was not predicted by bilingualism-related features. This between-groups analysis was followed by a regression analysis relating features of bilingual experience to n-back performance, but the results were non-significant in both bilingual groups. N-back analysis showed an advantage of late bilinguals over monolinguals and early bilinguals, while the latter two groups did not differ. For verbal and visuospatial WM composites, the group comparisons did not support the BEA hypothesis. They filled in an extensive questionnaire including background factors such as bilingualism and second language (L2) use, and performed 10 isomorphic verbal and visuospatial WM tasks that yielded three WM composite scores (visuospatial WM, verbal WM, n-back). Our online sample included 485 participants. Second, we examined whether certain aspects of bilingual experience, such as language switching frequency, are related to bilinguals’ WM scores.
First, we compared early and late bilingual vs. We addressed this issue in the domain of working memory (WM), as more complex WM tasks have been underrepresented in the previous literature. The bilingual executive advantage (BEA) hypothesis has attracted considerable research interest, but the findings are inconclusive.
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