Early research that relied on standardized assessments of intelligence reported negative effects of bilingualism for children, but a study by Peal and Lambert (1962) reported better performance by bilingual than monolingual children on verbal and nonverbal intelligence tests. This outcome led to the view that bilingualism was a positive…

Numerous studies on reading comprehension with monolingual children have shown that oral language, such as vocabulary, is an important factor in predicting reading comprehension success. However, few studies have looked at the reading comprehension performance of bilinguals, and less is known about the contributors to its success, linguistic or…

Bilingualism has been observed to influence cognitive processing across the lifespan but whether bilingual environments have an effect on selective attention and attention strategies in infancy remains an unresolved question. In Study 1, infants exposed to monolingual or bilingual environments participated in an eye-tracking cueing task in which…

This study examined executive control in sixty-two 5-year-old children who were monolingual or bilingual using behavioral and event-related potentials (ERPs) measures. All children performed equivalently on simple response inhibition (gift delay), but bilingual children outperformed monolinguals on interference suppression and complex response…

Two studies are reported comparing the performance of monolingual and bilingual children on tasks requiring different levels of working memory. In the first study, 56 5-year-olds performed a Simon-type task that manipulated working memory demands by comparing conditions based on two rules and four rules and manipulated conflict resolution demands…

Monolingual and bilingual 8-year-olds performed a computerized spatial perspective-taking task. Children were asked to decide how an observer saw a four-block array from one of three different positions (90 degrees, 180 degrees, and 270 degrees counter-clockwise from the child's position) by selecting one of four responses--the correct response,…

English receptive vocabulary scores from 797 monolingual and 808 bilingual participants between the ages of 17 and 89 years old were aggregated from 20 studies to compare standard scores across language groups. The distribution of scores was unimodal for both groups but the mean score was significantly different, with monolinguals obtaining higher…

Bilingual children have been shown to outperform monolingual children on tasks measuring executive functioning skills. This advantage is usually attributed to bilinguals' extensive practice in exercising selective attention and cognitive flexibility during language use because both languages are active when one of them is being used. We examined…

Two groups of 8-year-old children who were monolingual or bilingual completed a complex classification task in which they made semantic judgments on stimuli that were presented either visually or auditorily. The task requires coordinating a variety of executive control components, specifically working memory, inhibition, and shifting. When each of…

In 3 experiments, a total of 151 monolingual and bilingual 6-year-old children performed similarly on measures of language and cognitive ability; however, bilinguals solved the global-local and trail-making tasks more rapidly than monolinguals. This bilingual advantage was found not only for the traditionally demanding conditions (incongruent…

Young English-speaking monolingual and bilingual adults were examined for English proficiency, language use history, and performance on a flanker task. The bilinguals, who were about twenty years old, were divided into two groups (early bilinguals and late bilinguals) according to whether they became actively bilingual before or after the age of…

Studies often report that bilingual participants possess a smaller vocabulary in the language of testing than monolinguals, especially in research with children. However, each study is based on a small sample so it is difficult to determine whether the vocabulary difference is due to sampling error. We report the results of an analysis of 1,738…

We use a time-course analysis to examine the roles of vocabulary size and executive control in bilinguals' verbal fluency performance. Two groups of bilinguals and a group of monolingual adults were tested in English with verbal fluency subtests from the Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System. The two bilingual groups were equivalent in their…

Two studies are reported in which monolingual and bilingual children (Study 1) and adults (Study 2) completed a memory task involving proactive interference. In both cases, the bilinguals attained lower scores on a vocabulary test than monolinguals but performed the same on the proactive interference task. For the children, bilinguals made fewer…

To examine the effects of bilingualism on cognitive control, we studied monolingual and bilingual young adults performing a flanker task with functional MRI. The trial types of primary interest for this report were incongruent and no-go trials, representing interference suppression and response inhibition, respectively. Response times were similar…