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Previous research has indicated that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in cognitive tasks involving spatial working memory. The present study examines evidence for this claim using a different and arguably more ecologically valid method (the change blindness task). Bilingual and monolingual participants were presented with two versions of the same scenes and required to press a key as soon as they identified the alteration. They also completed the word and alpha span tasks, and the Corsi blocks task. The results in the change blindness task, controlled for group differences in non-verbal reasoning, indicated that bilinguals were faster and more accurate than monolinguals at detecting visual changes. Similar group differences were found on the Corsi block task. Unlike previous findings, no group differences were found on the verbal memory tasks. The results are discussed with reference to mechanisms of cognitive control as a locus of transfer between bilingualism and spatial working memory tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One key issue in bilingualism is how bilinguals control production, particularly to produce words in the less dominant language. Language switching is one method to investigate control processes. Language switching has been much studied in comprehension, e.g., in lexical decision task, but less so in production. Here we first present a study of language switching in Italian-English adult bilinguals in a naming task for visually presented words. We demonstrate an asymmetric pattern of time costs to switch language, where participants incurred a greater time cost to switch into naming in their dominant language (Italian). In addition, costs were greater where the stimuli were interlingual cognates or homographs than words existing in only one language, implicating lexical competition as a source of the cost. To clarify the operation of control processes, we then present two connectionist models of bilingual naming, based on the previous models of Seidenberg and McClelland (1989), Cohen, Dunbar and McClelland (1990), Gilbert and Shallice (2002), and Karaminis and Thomas (2010). Crucially, both models acquired their differential language dominance via an experience-dependent learning process. The models embody different assumptions about the language control processes that produce the switch cost. We consider which processing assumptions are sufficient to explain asymmetric language switch costs and word class effects on language switching in individual word reading, as well as generating novel predictions for future testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study compared the comprehension of syntactically simple with more complex sentences in Italian–English adult bilinguals and monolingual controls in the presence or absence of sentence-level interference. The task was to identify the agent of the sentence and we primarily examined the accuracy of response. The target sentence was signalled by the gender of the speaker, either a male or a female, and this varied over trials, where the target was spoken in a male voice the distractor was spoken in a female voice and vice versa. In contrast to other work showing a bilingual disadvantage in sentence comprehension under conditions of noise, we show that in this task, where voice permits selection of the target, adult bilingual speakers are in fact better able than their monolingual Italian peers to resist sentence-level interference when comprehension demands are high. Within bilingual speakers we also found that degree of proficiency in English correlated with the ability to resist interference for complex sentences both when the target and distractor were in Italian and when the target was in English and the distractor in Italian. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]