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Theoretically driven experiments may clarify questions about the bilingual advantage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2014

KLARA MARTON
KLARA MARTON*
Affiliation:
Graduate School and University Center, CUNY Eotvos Lorand University, BudapestKMarton@gc.cuny.edu
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Extract

In her keynote paper, Valian (2014) provides a comprehensive review of the literature that examines whether bilingual individuals outperform monolingual participants on various executive processing tasks. The author acknowledges that numerous factors contribute to the outcomes, such as variations in participants’ profile, differences in target functions, as well as variants of tasks and procedures. She also says in her review that, on the one hand, researchers use different tasks to measure similar functions; while, on the other hand, each of these tasks target somewhat different aspects of executive processing. The most widely used tasks, such as the Stroop or flanker tasks, measure several components of executive functions simultaneously.

Type
Peer Commentaries
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 37 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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