1985, for a review). In all these respects, Peal and Lambert's study compared favorably with the earlier ones. Recent research confirms this analysis (e.g., Nicolay & Poncelet, 2015).
Bilingualism and Executive Control
Since Peal and Lambert's (1962) seminal investigation, detailed knowledge has been gathered about aspects of cognition in which bilinguals can excel, such as in executive control (also called “attention control” or “cognitive control”). When bilinguals use one of their languages, the other language is simultaneously active as well. In order to select the targeted language, “language control” must be exerted, that is, the contextually inappropriate language must be suppressed or ignored and the contextually appropriate language must be selectively attended to. It is generally assumed that language control is effectuated by more general processes and mechanisms of executive control, which take care of the control of action in general. If true, the requirement to incessantly control their two languages may boost bilinguals' ability to exert executive control in general and, consequently, bilinguals should be better than monolinguals when they perform nonverbal tasks that require executive control.
This hypothesis has been confirmed in many studies (see Bialystok, Craik, Green, & Gollan, 2009, for a review). There is even evidence to suggest that this bilingual advantage can protect lifelong bilinguals against the onset of Alzheimer's disease, plausibly by contributing to cognitive reserve (Craik, Bialystok, & Freedman, 2010). That domain‐general control mechanisms regulate language control is also suggested by the finding that bilingual experience induces changes in structure and function of the brain regions responsible for executive control (e.g., Abutalebi et al., 2012). Recently, however, the view that bilingualism fosters executive control has come under attack because of the increasing number of studies demonstrating similar behavior of monolinguals and bilinguals in many tasks that are thought to index executive function (e.g., Paap & Greenberg, 2013; Valian, 2015). A plausible reason for the inconsistent results across studies is the large variability among both the bilingual populations tested and the tasks used to index executive function. Possibly, the advantageous effect of bilingualism on executive function only applies to specific bilingual populations (e.g., lifelong bilinguals using both languages each day, both actively and passively) and to specific aspects of executive functioning.
Bilingualism has become an omnipresent phenomenon in the modern world and it may not take long before monolingual speakers can hardly be found anymore. It is a promissory side‐effect of a development toward bilingualism as the norm that, in the process, a human's average cognitive skills may be lifted—as is suggested by the current research on the relation between bilingualism and nonverbal cognition.
SEE ALSO: Crosslinguistic Influence in Second Language Acquisition; Early Bilingualism; Multicompetence; Multilingualism and Metalinguistic Awareness
References
1 Abutalebi, J., Della Rosa, P. A., Green, D. W., Hernandez, M., Scifo, P., Keim, R., . . . & Costa, A. (2012). Bilingualism tunes the anterior cingulate cortex for conflict monitoring. Cerebral Cortex, 22, 2076–86.
2 Ameel, E., Malt, B. C., Storms, G., & Van Assche, F. (2009). Semantic convergence in the bilingual lexicon. Journal of Memory and Language, 60, 270–90.
3 Athanasopoulos, P., Damjanovic, L., Krajciova, A., & Sasaki, M. (2011). Representation of colour concepts in bilingual cognition: The case of Japanese blues. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14, 9–17.
4 Athanasopoulos, P., & Kasai, C. (2008). Language and thought in bilinguals: The case of grammatical number and nonverbal classification preferences. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 105–23.
5 Bassetti, B. (2007). Bilingualism and thought: Grammatical gender and concepts of objects in Italian–German bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 11, 251–73.
6 Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M., Green, D. W., & Gollan, T. H. (2009). Bilingual minds. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 10, 89–129.
7 Boroditsky, L., Ham, W., & Ramscar, M. (2002). What is universal in event perception? Comparing English and Indonesian speakers. In W. D. Gray & C. D. Schunn (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 168–73). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
8 Caskey‐Sirmons, L. A., & Hickerson, N. P. (1977). Semantic shift and bilingualism: Variation in the color terms of five languages. Anthropological Linguistics, 19, 358–67.
9 Cook, V., & Li Wei. (Eds.). (2016). The Cambridge handbook of linguistic multicompetence. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
10 Craik, F. I. M., Bialystok, E., & Freedman, M. (2010). Delaying the onset of Alzheimer disease: Bilingualism as a form of cognitive reserve. Neurology, 75, 1726–9.
11 De Groot, A. M. B. (2014). About phonological, grammatical, and semantic accents in bilinguals' language use and their cause. In L. Filipović & M. Pütz (Eds.), Multilingual cognition and language use: Processing and typological perspectives (pp. 229–262). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
12 Dussias, P. E. (2003). Syntactic ambiguity resolution in L2 learners: Some effects of bilinguality on L1 and L2 processing strategies. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25, 529–57.
13 Dussias, P. E., & Sagarra, N. (2007). The effect of exposure on syntactic parsing in Spanish–English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10, 101–16.
14 Ervin, S. M. (1961). Semantic shift in bilingualism. American Journal of Psychology, 24, 233–41.
15 Flege, J. E. (2002). Interactions between the native and second‐language phonetic systems. In P. Burmeister, T. Piske, & A. Rohde (Eds.), An integrated view of language development: Papers in honor of Henning Wode (pp. 217–44). Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag.
16 Flege, J. E. (2007). Language contact in bilingualism: Phonetic system interactions. In J. Cole & J. I. Hualde (Eds.), Laboratory phonology (Vol. 9, pp. 353–81). Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter.
17 Grosjean, F. (1989). Neurolinguists, beware! The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person. Brain and Language, 36, 3–15.
18 Hakuta, K., & Diaz, R. M. (1985). The relationship between degree of bilingualism and cognitive ability: A critical discussion and some new longitudinal data. In K. E. Nelson (Ed.), Children's language (Vol. 5, pp. 319–44). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
19 Lambert, W. E. (1977). The effects of bilingualism on the individual: Cognitive and sociocultural consequences. In P. A. Hornby (Ed.), Bilingualism: Psychological, social, and educational implications (pp. 15–27). New York, NY: Academic Press.
20 Laufer, B. (2003). The influence of L2 on L1 collocational knowledge and on L1 lexical diversity in free written expression. In V. Cook (Ed.), Effects of the second language on the first (pp. 19–31). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.
21 Majid, A., Jordan, F., & Dunn, M. (2015). Semantic systems in closely related languages. Language Sciences, 49, 1–18.
22 Marian, V., & Spivey, M. (2003). Competing activation in bilingual language processing: Within and between‐language competition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 97–115.
23 Morford, J. P., Kroll, J. F., Piñar, P., & Wilkinson, E. (2014). Bilingual word recognition in deaf and hearing signers: Effects of proficiency and language dominance on cross‐language activation. Second Language Research, 30, 251–71.
24 Nicolay,
