Morales, J. 1 , Bajo, M. T. 1 & Gómez-Ariza, C. J. 2
1 University of Granada
2 University of Jaén
There is growing evidence showing that executive functioning benefits from bilingual experience, specifically on tasks engaging conflict resolution (e.g., Bialystok et al., 2004; Costa et al., 2008, 2009; Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008). Nevertheless, there is no clear consensus regarding the nature of the mechanisms underlying this bilingual advantage. In our experiments, we explored bilinguals’ performance in tasks involving different executive functions. We compared the inhibitory control and goal maintenance skills of young monolinguals and young early bilinguals in tasks which involve overriding competing responses, context processing, and continuous performance. Contrary to our predictions, we did not find higher inhibitory capacity for our bilinguals. However, our results showed that bilinguals made less mistakes prompted by misleading context information in a continuous performance task. These findings suggest that bilingual experience may lead to higher ability to focus on the goals of the task. Therefore, the better performance in conflict resolution tasks observed in previous studies might be mediated by goal maintenance and not strictly due to inhibitory control.