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1. Attentional orienting abilities in bilinguals: Evidence from a large infant sample

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101683  

   Arredondo, Maria M; Aslin, Richard N; Zhang, Minyu; Werker, Janet F (January 2022, Infant Behavior and Development)

   Ren, Jie; Hohle, Barbara (Ed.)

   A key question in studies of cognitive development is whether bilingual environments impact higher-cognitive functions. Inconclusive evidence in search of a “bilingual cognitive advantage” has sparked debates on the reliability of these findings. Few studies with infants have examined this question, but most of them include small samples. The current study presents evidence from a large sample of 6- and 10-month-old monolingual- and bilingual-exposed infants (N=152), which includes a longitudinal subset (n=31), who completed a cueing attentional orienting task. The results suggest bilingual infants showed significant developmental gains in latency performance during the condition that was most cognitively demanding (Incongruent). The results also revealed bilingual infants’ performance was associated with their parents’ dual-language switching behavior. Taken together, these results provide support that bilingual experiences (i.e., dual-language mixing) influence infants’ shifting and orienting of attention. 

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2. Regulation and Control: What Bimodal Bilingualism Reveals about Learning and Juggling Two Languages

   https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7030214  

   Frederiksen, Anne Therese; Kroll, Judith F. (September 2022, Languages)

   In individuals who know more than one language, the languages are always active to some degree. This has consequences for language processing, but bilinguals rarely make mistakes in language selection. A prevailing explanation is that bilingualism is supported by strong cognitive control abilities, developed through long-term practice with managing multiple languages and spilling over into more general executive functions. However, not all bilinguals are the same, and not all contexts for bilingualism provide the same support for control and regulation abilities. This paper reviews research on hearing sign–speech bimodal bilinguals who have a unique ability to use and comprehend their two languages at the same time. We discuss the role of this research in re-examining the role of cognitive control in bilingual language regulation, focusing on how results from bimodal bilingualism research relate to recent findings emphasizing the correlation of control abilities with a bilingual’s contexts of language use. Most bimodal bilingualism research has involved individuals in highly English-dominant language contexts. We offer a critical examination of how existing bimodal bilingualism findings have been interpreted, discuss the value of broadening the scope of this research and identify long-standing questions about bilingualism and L2 learning which might benefit from this perspective. 

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3. Bilingual attentional control: Evidence from the Partial Repetition Cost paradigm

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728923000731  

   deMeurisse, Grace; Kaan, Edith (October 2023, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition)

   Abstract The effects of bilingual language experience on cognitive control are still debated. A recent proposal is that being bilingual enhances attentional control. This is based on studies showing smaller effects of the nature of the preceding trial on the current trial in bilinguals (Grundy et al., 2017). However, performance on such tasks can also be accounted for by lower-level processes such as the binding and unbinding of stimulus and response features. The current study used a Partial Repetition Cost paradigm to explicitly test whether language experience can affect such processes. Results showed that bi- and monolinguals did not differ in their responses when the stimulus features were task-relevant. However, the bilinguals showed smaller partial repetition costs when the features were task-irrelevant. These findings suggest that language experience does not affect lower-level processes, and supports the view that bilinguals exhibit enhanced attentional disengagement. 

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4. Bilingualism alters infants’ cortical organization for attentional orienting mechanisms

   https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13172  

   Arredondo, Maria M; Aslin, Richard N; Werker, Janet F (August 2021, Developmental Science)

   A bilingual environment is associated with changes in the brain's structure and function. Some suggest that bilingualism also improves higher‐cognitive functions in infants as young as 6‐months, yet whether this effect is associated with changes in the infant brain remains unknown. In the present study, we measured brain activity using functional near‐infrared spectroscopy in monolingual‐ and bilingual‐raised 6‐ and 10‐month‐old infants. Infants completed an orienting attention task, in which a cue was presented prior to an object appearing on the same (Valid) or opposite (Invalid) side of a display. Task performance did not differ between the groups but neural activity did. At 6‐months, both groups showed greater activity for Valid (> Invalid) trials in frontal regions (left hemisphere for bilinguals, right hemisphere for monolinguals). At 10‐months, bilinguals showed greater activity for Invalid (> Valid) trials in bilateral frontal regions, while monolinguals showed greater brain activity for Valid (> Invalid) trials in left frontal regions. Bilinguals’ brain activity trended with their parents’ reporting of dual‐language mixing when speaking to their child. These findings are the first to indicate how early (dual) language experience can alter the cortical organization underlying broader, non‐linguistic cognitive functions during the first year of life. 

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5. Moving From Bilingual Traits to States: Understanding Cognition and Language Processing Through Moment-to-Moment Variation

   https://doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00046  

   Salig, Lauren K.; Valdés Kroff, Jorge R.; Slevc, L. Robert; Novick, Jared M. (November 2021, Neurobiology of Language)

   Abstract The study of how bilingualism is linked to cognitive processing, including executive functioning, has historically focused on comparing bilinguals to monolinguals across a range of tasks. These group comparisons presume to capture relatively stable cognitive traits and have revealed important insights about the architecture of the language processing system that could not have been gleaned from studying monolinguals alone. However, there are drawbacks to using a group-comparison, or Traits, approach. In this theoretical review, we outline some limitations of treating executive functions as stable traits and of treating bilinguals as a uniform group when compared to monolinguals. To build on what we have learned from group comparisons, we advocate for an emerging complementary approach to the question of cognition and bilingualism. Using an approach that compares bilinguals to themselves under different linguistic or cognitive contexts allows researchers to ask questions about how language and cognitive processes interact based on dynamically fluctuating cognitive and neural states. A States approach, which has already been used by bilingualism researchers, allows for cause-and-effect hypotheses and shifts our focus from questions of group differences to questions of how varied linguistic environments influence cognitive operations in the moment and how fluctuations in cognitive engagement impact language processing. 

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