Introduction to Bilingualism and Cognitive Control

Abstract

This editorial represents the best of the new research on each of these issues to understand how control in language processing is achieved and how domain-general cognitive processes are themselves affected by language experience. A number of papers in the special issue addressed language switching habits as an index of individual differences rather than focusing on the more general patterns of switch costs themselves. One of the article used performance on a switch task to identify participants as switchers or non-switchers based on the degree of unintentional switching during naming. They found that non-switchers were advantaged on aspects of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task and the Flanker task, indicating that individual differences in language control and executive control function are related. As should be clear, this special topic has generated many exiting new contributions to some of the most important questions that relate to bilingualism and cognitive control. An issue that has not been addressed in this set of papers, is the question how language environment affects concurrent processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)