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Bilingualism, Executive Function, and Beyond: Questions and insights
Edited by Irina A. Sekerina, Lauren Spradlin and Virginia Valian
[Studies in Bilingualism 57] 2019
► pp. 147–160

Chapter 10
Language control and executive control

Can studies on language processing distinguish the two?

| The University of Reading | UiT The Arctic University of Norway
| The University of Edinburgh
| UiT The Arctic University of Norway | NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology

In this paper, we review recent literature on the cognitive benefits of bilingualism and suggest that studies focusing on language processing can provide insights in the debate surrounding the “bilingual advantage hypothesis”. We argue that cross-language priming can be a useful research tool, because it recruits different types of abilities, some of which may not be language-specific. Specifically, we claim that the mechanism that allows speakers to correctly select the target language in cross-language priming may be the same that is needed in cognitive tasks to alternate between different sets of rules. We further argue that the choice of a specific linguistic structure is, by contrast, governed by processes that are purely linguistic in nature.

Keywords: bilingualism, language processing, executive control
Article outline
  • 1.Bilingual language processing and cognition
  • 2.Syntactic priming as a research tool
  • 3.Does inhibition play a role in cross-language priming?
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1The priming task
    • 4.2The cognitive task
    • 4.3Coding
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1The bilingual group
    • 5.2The bilingual vs. the monolingual group
    • 5.3Interaction between Noswitch and DCCS
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • References
Published online: 12 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.57.10wol
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