Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognition

Item

Title

The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognition

Author

Bialystok, Ellen

Research Area

Cognition and Emotions

Topic

Language

Abstract

In spite of early warnings of dire consequences of bilingualism for children's cognitive development, research in the past 50 years has revealed that bilingualism is in fact a positive developmental experience. These benefits were more recently shown to extend across the life span. New research is incorporating neuroimaging to determine the brain bases of these effects and exploring the possibility that the beneficial effects of bilingualism can compensate for degeneration of other cognitive functions that are associated with dementia, thereby postponing symptom onset.

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Identifier

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extracted text

The Impact of Bilingualism
on Cognition
ELLEN BIALYSTOK

Abstract
In spite of early warnings of dire consequences of bilingualism for children’s cognitive development, research in the past 50 years has revealed that bilingualism is in
fact a positive developmental experience. These benefits were more recently shown
to extend across the life span. New research is incorporating neuroimaging to determine the brain bases of these effects and exploring the possibility that the beneficial
effects of bilingualism can compensate for degeneration of other cognitive functions
that are associated with dementia, thereby postponing symptom onset.

INTRODUCTION
The relation between language and cognition has long captured the interest
of theorists and researchers: How do language and thought interact? Is cognition limited by levels of linguistic proficiency? What are the conditions necessary to achieve high levels of language ability? Nowhere is this interaction
more dramatic or more consequential than in child development. In the first
several years of life, the emergence of both these abilities is well documented
and occurs at a breathtaking rate. And yet, in spite of ongoing philosophical debate about such possible interactions, there has always been a common belief that language matters deeply for cognitive development, and that
introducing multiple languages into children’s lives must have consequence.
For almost a century, therefore, the possibility that childhood acquisition of
more than one language could significantly affect the developing cognitive
system has been considered to be an important issue. What has changed
over time is the judgment about the outcome. With only a few exceptions,
the majority of early studies on childhood bilingualism reported superior
cognitive performance, often defined in terms of IQ scores, for monolingual
children, sometimes describing bilingual children as “inferior” or suffering
from “mental confusion” (Saer, 1923). Thus, the prevailing consensus was
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

that bilingualism created an obstacle to children’s cognitive development
(for reviews see Barac & Bialystok, 2011; Darcy, 1963; Hakuta, 1986). A significant change in this attitude began to emerge after an influential study
by Peal and Lambert (1962) in which they demonstrated better performance
on both verbal and nonverbal tests for bilingual children than for comparable monolinguals. The possibility that bilingualism might be beneficial to
children’s development was a radical departure from commonly held views.
The investigation of the effect of bilingualism on children’s cognitive development is now an active area of research, and the results are more complex
and more nuanced than the early research allowed. Research on bilingualism now informs an understanding of the relation between language and
cognition in development, the role of experience and training in cognition
across the life span, and cognitive change in older age. Thus, to a degree that
would have surprised the early researchers, the study of bilingualism provides a powerful model of the effect of experience on the mind and the role
of neuroplasticity in the development and modification of brain networks
throughout life.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The earliest systematic research indicating positive outcomes for bilingual
children focused on the development of metalinguistic awareness. The idea
was that children who were learning two languages would more rapidly
develop the formative insights about language and its structure that are
essential for high-level language use and literacy. Consistent with this
idea, studies examining children’s awareness of phonology (e.g., Ibrahim,
Eviatar, & Aharon-Peretz, 2007), syntax (e.g., Galambos & Goldin-Meadow,
1990), words (e.g., Feldman & Shen, 1971), and morphology (e.g., Cheung
et al., 2010) generally showed more advanced understanding for bilingual
children. However, such outcomes were not found in all studies, pointing
to a more complex story. Considering just phonological awareness, an
essential foundation for alphabetic literacy, subsequent research revealed
that the extent to which bilingual children demonstrated precocious development depended on the nature of the writing system (McBride-Chang,
Bialystok, Chong, & Li, 2004), the relative complexity of the orthography
(Bialystok, Majumder, & Martin, 2003), and the language of schooling (Barac
& Bialystok, 2012), to name a few. Crucially, the type of task also mattered:
Metalinguistic tasks that simply tapped knowledge of rules were performed
equivalently by monolingual and bilingual children but similar tasks that
included interfering information that needed to be ignored were performed
better by bilingual children. For example, in a grammaticality judgment
task in which children were instructed to respond to the grammaticality

The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognition

3

of sentences and ignore the meaning, all children were equally accurate in
determining that the sentence “Why is the dog bark?” contains a grammatical error so is incorrect, but bilingual children were more successful than
monolingual children in responding that the sentence “Why is the cat barking?” is grammatically correct, although it is silly (Bialystok, 1986). Thus,
bilingual children were not misled by the salient but irrelevant meaning.
The observation that the bilingual advantage in metalinguistic tasks was
confined to conditions in which attentional effort was required to ignore
distraction led to the possibility that this effect might be seen beyond the
domain of language. It is not surprising that a linguistic experience impacts
aspects of linguistic development, but it is more surprising that effects would
be found in nonverbal cognitive performance. Using paradigms similar
to those showing bilingual advantages in metalinguistic tasks, the early
research using nonverbal cognitive tasks revealed better similar performance
by monolingual and bilingual children on tasks that were based largely
on knowledge but better performance by bilingual children on tasks that
included distraction (Bialystok & Majumder, 1998). This distinction between
tasks based primary on representational knowledge and attentional control
has been maintained in recent research: Monolingual and bilingual children
perform equivalently on tests of representation, such as short-term visual
memory, but bilingual children outperform monolinguals tasks requiring
attentional control, such as the flanker task (Engel de Abreu, Cruz-Santos,
Tourinho, Martin, & Bialystok, 2012). Overall, bilingual advantages have
been reported in a range of nonverbal cognitive tasks that require attentional
control, including tests involving inhibition (Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008),
monitoring (Bialystok, 1999), creativity (Adi-Japha, Berberich-Artzi, &
Libnawi, 2010), theory of mind (Goetz, 2003), and multi-tasking (Bialystok,
2011). Together these studies converge on the interpretation that executive
control is more advanced in bilingual children than in monolinguals.
The next step in establishing this body of research was to determine
whether these effects found with children persisted into adulthood.
Although it was interesting that bilingual children had more advanced executive control than comparable monolingual children, it is also the case that
for the types of tasks used in this research, all children would eventually be
able to solve them, so there may not be any added value in mastering them
a little earlier. However, evidence for these effects in adulthood would have
greater consequence. The first study to investigate this question compared
monolinguals and bilinguals between the ages of about 30 and 80 years
old performing a Simon task, a standard measure of executive control. The
results showed reliable effects of bilingualism at all ages, providing the first
evidence that the impact of bilingualism might be more extensive and more
profound than previously thought (Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan,

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

2004). These results were subsequently replicated using different tasks,
populations, and methodologies (Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2008; Gold, Kim,
Johnson, Kryscio, & Smith, 2013; Salvatierra & Rosselli, 2010).
Why would the experience of using two languages have an impact on
nonverbal cognitive performance? The answer appears to be based on the
discovery that both languages for a bilingual are constantly activated to
some degree when the individual is using one of them. This somewhat
surprising finding has been supported by enormous amounts of evidence
from behavioral, imaging, and patient studies (see Kroll, Dussias, Bogulski,
& Valdes-Kroff, 2012, for a recent review). This constant activity from the
nontarget language should lead to frequent errors in language selection, yet
such errors are extremely rare. Therefore, there must be a mechanism that
controls selection of the correct language in the face of interference from
the activated but inappropriate alternative. An early suggestion for this
mechanism was proposed by Green (1998) in his Inhibitory Control Model.
The essential claim was that a domain-general attention system used broadly
to focus attention on relevant targets and inhibit incorrect alternatives was
applied to the problem of language selection. Research examining the neural
bases of these claims confirmed the involvement of such domain-general
processes in language selection (Abutalebi et al., 2008; Luk, Green, Abutalebi,
& Grady, 2012). The interpretation, therefore, is that the constant use of this
domain-general control system for language selection enhances that system
in bilinguals and is manifest as better performance by bilinguals on a broad
range executive control tasks, including nonverbal ones (Bialystok, Craik,
Green, & Gollan, 2009).
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Two recent developments extend this research into new domains. The first is
the incorporation of neuroimaging into these investigations and the second
is the possibility that bilingualism contributes to cognitive reserve.
A wide range of imaging techniques have been introduced to studies of
bilingualism, including structural analyses of brain volume (Mechelli et al.,
2004), functional investigations of network connectivity (Abutalebi et al.,
2012; Luk, Anderson, Craik, Grady, & Bialystok, 2010; Grady, Luk, Craik,
& Bialystok, 2015), and electrophysiological recordings of brain activity
(Rodriguez-Fornells, Rotte, Heinze, Nosselt, & Munte, 2002; Wu & Thierry,
2010). These approaches expand on existing research by identifying precise
aspects of brain function, which are modified by bilingualism. Together,
these studies document the structural and functional brain changes that
follow from extended bilingual experience and the cognitive consequences
associated with them. In this way, bilingualism has been shown to be a

The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognition

5

model for evidence of lifelong neuroplasticity, the notion that experience can
lead to persistent change in behavior that is mediated by the reorganization
of synaptic connections in specific neural circuits (Kolb et al., 2012). For
example, in the study by Luk et al. (2010), monolingual and bilingual participants performing a flanker task produced similar behavioral results in
terms of reaction time to the various conditions, but bilinguals used different
neural circuits than monolinguals when responding to incongruent trials.
Moreover, both Abutalebi et al. (2012) and Gold et al. (2013) showed that
bilinguals could achieve equivalent levels of performance as monolinguals
with less activation of the anterior cingulate cortex, a crucial part of the
executive control network, indicating more efficient performance. The
question of the extent to which neuroplasticity is available throughout life,
the types of experiences that enable brain reorganization and change, and
the possibility for exploiting such experiences to provide intervention and
training for cognitive functions that are weak or compromised through
disease or disability are exciting new directions for this research.
The second new development comes from recent studies that have reported
that bilingualism is associated with a significant delay in the onset of symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease (Alladi et al., 2013; Craik, Bialystok, & Freedman, 2010). The increasing prevalence of dementia (Plassman et al., 2007)
in conjunction with promising but limited progress in the search for pharmacological interventions (Zhu et al., 2013) points to the need for alternative
approaches to disease management. Although bilingualism could not in itself
be used as an intervention in the sense that it is implausible to consider that
one could postpone societal Alzheimer’s disease by teaching foreign languages, it can nonetheless be used as a model for considering how lifestyle
factors in general contribute to cognitive reserve and be harnessed to maintain cognitive health into older age.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Three issues are a high priority for future research. The first is to define
bilingualism in such a way that the essential aspects of bilingual experience
that are responsible for these cognitive changes can be identified. The
second is to examine various bilingual contexts to extrapolate the key
features that differentiate them and determine which contexts are most
likely to support cognitive change. The third is to consider the processing
demands of different cognitive tasks and refine our notions of the specific
effect that bilingualism can be expected to exert on cognition. The effects of
bilingualism on cognition are subtle and not found in all circumstances, so
understanding how this aspect of neuroplasticity functions requires introducing more precision into all analyses. The exploration of these issues will

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

require multi-method approaches, including both behavioral and imaging
studies, co-operation among researchers operating in different contexts
with different languages, and interdisciplinary collaboration to provide
sophisticated analyses from linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics,
cognition, and neuroscience, to name a few.
The essential difficulty with this type of research is that none of the central concepts takes a simple definition. The most essential question—Who
is bilingual?—depends on establishing criteria for age of acquisition and circumstances under which a second language was acquired, both absolute and
relative levels of proficiency in the two languages, extent to which each of the
languages is used, contexts in which each language is used, and so on. It is
rare to find people who are purely monolingual in that they have never taken
a language course, traveled abroad, or spent time with speakers of another
language, or truly bilingual in that they are equally fluent in two languages
that they use regularly. The fiction of a categorical distinction between these
groups is necessary to make progress on the overall questions, but it is also
clear that differences in bilingual experience lead to different outcomes (Luk
& Bialystok, 2013). Understanding the details of how learning and using two
languages leads to modifications in cognitive ability and organization of cognitive networks will require generating more detailed analyses of relevant
individual differences factors that distinguish among bilingual experiences.
Just as individual differences matter, so too do the contexts in which individuals function. An important factor in how bilinguals use their two languages is the type and extent of support that one or both languages receive
from the community. In communities where bilingualism is considered to be
widespread and most individuals will be competent in both languages, control of language selection is less important because intrusions will not disrupt
conversation. In contrast, communities that are largely monolingual or entertain negative attitudes toward bilingualism will demand greater degrees of
language control for bilinguals in order to function effectively. These distinctions and their possible implications for both behavioral and brain consequences of bilingualism have been described by Green and Abutalebi (2013).
Similarly, there may be differential effects from other factors that are external to the individual such as similarity between the two languages or the
relation between the writing systems in the two languages that could conceivably mediate the effects of bilingualism on cognition. These issues need
to be examined in detail.
The third factor that is currently underspecified in research on the cognitive
effects of bilingualism is the nature of the tasks or processes for which these
effects may be expected to occur. It is important to delineate the range of
performances for which bilingual effects are found in conjunction with
those for which bilingualism does not matter. Various proposals for the

The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognition

7

types of task performance that are affected by bilingualism have led to
different conceptions of the mechanism that might be responsible (e.g.,
Hilchey & Klein, 2011). Even within specific processes, such as inhibition,
differences in the type of inhibition involved seem to determine whether
bilinguals will demonstrate performance advantages (Carlson & Meltzoff,
2008; Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008), and small differences in difficulty
in a single task conspire to determine whether bilinguals will outperform
their monolingual peers (Bialystok, 2006). There is much we do not know
about the situations in which bilingual performance can be expected to
demonstrate these processing advantages in executive control, but further
progress in understanding these effects requires an explicit account of those
situations.
There has always been a commonsense belief that language matters for cognition, and that it matters especially for children’s cognitive development.
Two insights from research in the past 50 years have confirmed and refined
that belief. First, the very fact that these interactions between language and
cognition occur attests to a model of mind that is holistic and deeply interactive, ruling out earlier ideas centered on modular abilities and isolated
skill development. Second, the intuitions that language experience could be
important for children’s cognitive development has been shown to be a lifelong phenomenon in which the effects of bilingualism impact cognitive processes across the life span, and acquiring another language at any age has the
potential to modify cognitive systems. This story is about bilingualism, but
it is equally a story about neuroplasticity in which the experiences in which
we engage have the potential to induce cognitive change throughout life.
This research reported in this essay was funded by grant A2559 from
National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
and grant R01HD052523 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
DEFINITION OF TERMS
Neuroplasticity. This is the view that the brain maintains the ability to continually rewire throughout life, particularly in response to experience or training. It is contrary to earlier ideas that brain networks were fixed in adulthood. The possibility of neuroplasticity has important implications for therapy, such as recovery from stroke, where targeted training can create new circuitry and restore some use of muscles that had been disabled by the stroke.
Simon Task. This is an experimental paradigm in which participants are
given a simple rule, “if you see a red square press the key on the right; if
you see a blue square press the key on the left” and are asked to respond

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

as rapidly as possible to red and blue squares that are presented on the
computer by pressing the appropriate key. The squares are presented on
either side of the display rather than in the center, so the response key
can either be on the same side as the stimulus (congruent trial) or on the
opposite side (incongruent trial). Because we automatically respond to
position information, the incongruent trials require inhibiting that natural
response to press the key required by the rule. The additional time necessary
to make these responses is the Simon effect and is a measure of executive
control.
Flanker Task. This is an experimental paradigm in which participants see a
row of stimuli, such as five arrows, and are asked to press a key as quickly
as possible to indicate what direction the central arrow is facing. The other
four arrows can either be facing in the same direction (congruent trial) or the
opposite direction (incongruent trial). The additional time needed to overcome the pull created by the flanking arrows for the incongruent trials is the
flanker effect and is a measure of executive control.

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ELLEN BIALYSTOK SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Ellen Bialystok is a Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology at York
University and an Associate Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of the
Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care. She obtained her PhD in 1976 from the
University of Toronto specializing in cognitive and language development
in children. Her current research focuses on the effect of bilingualism
on language and cognition across the life span showing modification in
cognitive systems from this experience. Her research uses both behavioral
and neuroimaging methods and examines participants who are children,
younger or older adults, as well as patients. She has published extensively in
the form of books, scientific articles, and book chapters. She is a fellow of the
Royal Society of Canada and among her awards are the Canadian Society
for Brain Behaviour and Cognitive Science Hebb Award (2011), Killam
Prize for the Social Sciences (2010), York University President’s Research
Award of Merit (2009), Donald T. Stuss Award for Research Excellence at the
Baycrest Geriatric Centre (2005), Dean’s Award for Outstanding Research
(2002), Killam Research Fellowship (2001), and the Walter Gordon Research
Fellowship (1999).
RELATED ESSAYS
Theory of Mind and Behavior (Psychology), Amanda C. Brandone
Language, Perspective, and Memory (Psychology), Rachel A. Ryskin et al.
Delusions (Psychology), Max Coltheart
Misinformation and How to Correct It (Psychology), John Cook et al.
Insight (Psychology), Brian Erickson and John Kounios
Cognitive Processes Involved in Stereotyping (Psychology), Susan T. Fiske and
Cydney H. Dupree
State of the Art in Competition Research (Psychology), Márta Fülöp and Gábor
Orosz
Language and Thought (Psychology), Susan Goldin-Meadow
Concepts and Semantic Memory (Psychology), Barbara C. Malt
Gestural Communication in Nonhuman Species (Anthropology), Simone Pika
Attention and Perception (Psychology), Ronald A. Rensink

12

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Vocal Communication in Primates (Anthropology), Katie E. Slocombe
How Form Constrains Function in the Human Brain (Psychology), Timothy
D. Verstynen
Speech Perception (Psychology), Athena Vouloumanos
Theory of Mind (Psychology), Henry Wellman



The Impact of Bilingualism
on Cognition
ELLEN BIALYSTOK

Abstract
In spite of early warnings of dire consequences of bilingualism for children’s cognitive development, research in the past 50 years has revealed that bilingualism is in
fact a positive developmental experience. These benefits were more recently shown
to extend across the life span. New research is incorporating neuroimaging to determine the brain bases of these effects and exploring the possibility that the beneficial
effects of bilingualism can compensate for degeneration of other cognitive functions
that are associated with dementia, thereby postponing symptom onset.

INTRODUCTION
The relation between language and cognition has long captured the interest
of theorists and researchers: How do language and thought interact? Is cognition limited by levels of linguistic proficiency? What are the conditions necessary to achieve high levels of language ability? Nowhere is this interaction
more dramatic or more consequential than in child development. In the first
several years of life, the emergence of both these abilities is well documented
and occurs at a breathtaking rate. And yet, in spite of ongoing philosophical debate about such possible interactions, there has always been a common belief that language matters deeply for cognitive development, and that
introducing multiple languages into children’s lives must have consequence.
For almost a century, therefore, the possibility that childhood acquisition of
more than one language could significantly affect the developing cognitive
system has been considered to be an important issue. What has changed
over time is the judgment about the outcome. With only a few exceptions,
the majority of early studies on childhood bilingualism reported superior
cognitive performance, often defined in terms of IQ scores, for monolingual
children, sometimes describing bilingual children as “inferior” or suffering
from “mental confusion” (Saer, 1923). Thus, the prevailing consensus was
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

that bilingualism created an obstacle to children’s cognitive development
(for reviews see Barac & Bialystok, 2011; Darcy, 1963; Hakuta, 1986). A significant change in this attitude began to emerge after an influential study
by Peal and Lambert (1962) in which they demonstrated better performance
on both verbal and nonverbal tests for bilingual children than for comparable monolinguals. The possibility that bilingualism might be beneficial to
children’s development was a radical departure from commonly held views.
The investigation of the effect of bilingualism on children’s cognitive development is now an active area of research, and the results are more complex
and more nuanced than the early research allowed. Research on bilingualism now informs an understanding of the relation between language and
cognition in development, the role of experience and training in cognition
across the life span, and cognitive change in older age. Thus, to a degree that
would have surprised the early researchers, the study of bilingualism provides a powerful model of the effect of experience on the mind and the role
of neuroplasticity in the development and modification of brain networks
throughout life.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The earliest systematic research indicating positive outcomes for bilingual
children focused on the development of metalinguistic awareness. The idea
was that children who were learning two languages would more rapidly
develop the formative insights about language and its structure that are
essential for high-level language use and literacy. Consistent with this
idea, studies examining children’s awareness of phonology (e.g., Ibrahim,
Eviatar, & Aharon-Peretz, 2007), syntax (e.g., Galambos & Goldin-Meadow,
1990), words (e.g., Feldman & Shen, 1971), and morphology (e.g., Cheung
et al., 2010) generally showed more advanced understanding for bilingual
children. However, such outcomes were not found in all studies, pointing
to a more complex story. Considering just phonological awareness, an
essential foundation for alphabetic literacy, subsequent research revealed
that the extent to which bilingual children demonstrated precocious development depended on the nature of the writing system (McBride-Chang,
Bialystok, Chong, & Li, 2004), the relative complexity of the orthography
(Bialystok, Majumder, & Martin, 2003), and the language of schooling (Barac
& Bialystok, 2012), to name a few. Crucially, the type of task also mattered:
Metalinguistic tasks that simply tapped knowledge of rules were performed
equivalently by monolingual and bilingual children but similar tasks that
included interfering information that needed to be ignored were performed
better by bilingual children. For example, in a grammaticality judgment
task in which children were instructed to respond to the grammaticality

The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognition

3

of sentences and ignore the meaning, all children were equally accurate in
determining that the sentence “Why is the dog bark?” contains a grammatical error so is incorrect, but bilingual children were more successful than
monolingual children in responding that the sentence “Why is the cat barking?” is grammatically correct, although it is silly (Bialystok, 1986). Thus,
bilingual children were not misled by the salient but irrelevant meaning.
The observation that the bilingual advantage in metalinguistic tasks was
confined to conditions in which attentional effort was required to ignore
distraction led to the possibility that this effect might be seen beyond the
domain of language. It is not surprising that a linguistic experience impacts
aspects of linguistic development, but it is more surprising that effects would
be found in nonverbal cognitive performance. Using paradigms similar
to those showing bilingual advantages in metalinguistic tasks, the early
research using nonverbal cognitive tasks revealed better similar performance
by monolingual and bilingual children on tasks that were based largely
on knowledge but better performance by bilingual children on tasks that
included distraction (Bialystok & Majumder, 1998). This distinction between
tasks based primary on representational knowledge and attentional control
has been maintained in recent research: Monolingual and bilingual children
perform equivalently on tests of representation, such as short-term visual
memory, but bilingual children outperform monolinguals tasks requiring
attentional control, such as the flanker task (Engel de Abreu, Cruz-Santos,
Tourinho, Martin, & Bialystok, 2012). Overall, bilingual advantages have
been reported in a range of nonverbal cognitive tasks that require attentional
control, including tests involving inhibition (Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008),
monitoring (Bialystok, 1999), creativity (Adi-Japha, Berberich-Artzi, &
Libnawi, 2010), theory of mind (Goetz, 2003), and multi-tasking (Bialystok,
2011). Together these studies converge on the interpretation that executive
control is more advanced in bilingual children than in monolinguals.
The next step in establishing this body of research was to determine
whether these effects found with children persisted into adulthood.
Although it was interesting that bilingual children had more advanced executive control than comparable monolingual children, it is also the case that
for the types of tasks used in this research, all children would eventually be
able to solve them, so there may not be any added value in mastering them
a little earlier. However, evidence for these effects in adulthood would have
greater consequence. The first study to investigate this question compared
monolinguals and bilinguals between the ages of about 30 and 80 years
old performing a Simon task, a standard measure of executive control. The
results showed reliable effects of bilingualism at all ages, providing the first
evidence that the impact of bilingualism might be more extensive and more
profound than previously thought (Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan,

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

2004). These results were subsequently replicated using different tasks,
populations, and methodologies (Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2008; Gold, Kim,
Johnson, Kryscio, & Smith, 2013; Salvatierra & Rosselli, 2010).
Why would the experience of using two languages have an impact on
nonverbal cognitive performance? The answer appears to be based on the
discovery that both languages for a bilingual are constantly activated to
some degree when the individual is using one of them. This somewhat
surprising finding has been supported by enormous amounts of evidence
from behavioral, imaging, and patient studies (see Kroll, Dussias, Bogulski,
& Valdes-Kroff, 2012, for a recent review). This constant activity from the
nontarget language should lead to frequent errors in language selection, yet
such errors are extremely rare. Therefore, there must be a mechanism that
controls selection of the correct language in the face of interference from
the activated but inappropriate alternative. An early suggestion for this
mechanism was proposed by Green (1998) in his Inhibitory Control Model.
The essential claim was that a domain-general attention system used broadly
to focus attention on relevant targets and inhibit incorrect alternatives was
applied to the problem of language selection. Research examining the neural
bases of these claims confirmed the involvement of such domain-general
processes in language selection (Abutalebi et al., 2008; Luk, Green, Abutalebi,
& Grady, 2012). The interpretation, therefore, is that the constant use of this
domain-general control system for language selection enhances that system
in bilinguals and is manifest as better performance by bilinguals on a broad
range executive control tasks, including nonverbal ones (Bialystok, Craik,
Green, & Gollan, 2009).
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Two recent developments extend this research into new domains. The first is
the incorporation of neuroimaging into these investigations and the second
is the possibility that bilingualism contributes to cognitive reserve.
A wide range of imaging techniques have been introduced to studies of
bilingualism, including structural analyses of brain volume (Mechelli et al.,
2004), functional investigations of network connectivity (Abutalebi et al.,
2012; Luk, Anderson, Craik, Grady, & Bialystok, 2010; Grady, Luk, Craik,
& Bialystok, 2015), and electrophysiological recordings of brain activity
(Rodriguez-Fornells, Rotte, Heinze, Nosselt, & Munte, 2002; Wu & Thierry,
2010). These approaches expand on existing research by identifying precise
aspects of brain function, which are modified by bilingualism. Together,
these studies document the structural and functional brain changes that
follow from extended bilingual experience and the cognitive consequences
associated with them. In this way, bilingualism has been shown to be a

The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognition

5

model for evidence of lifelong neuroplasticity, the notion that experience can
lead to persistent change in behavior that is mediated by the reorganization
of synaptic connections in specific neural circuits (Kolb et al., 2012). For
example, in the study by Luk et al. (2010), monolingual and bilingual participants performing a flanker task produced similar behavioral results in
terms of reaction time to the various conditions, but bilinguals used different
neural circuits than monolinguals when responding to incongruent trials.
Moreover, both Abutalebi et al. (2012) and Gold et al. (2013) showed that
bilinguals could achieve equivalent levels of performance as monolinguals
with less activation of the anterior cingulate cortex, a crucial part of the
executive control network, indicating more efficient performance. The
question of the extent to which neuroplasticity is available throughout life,
the types of experiences that enable brain reorganization and change, and
the possibility for exploiting such experiences to provide intervention and
training for cognitive functions that are weak or compromised through
disease or disability are exciting new directions for this research.
The second new development comes from recent studies that have reported
that bilingualism is associated with a significant delay in the onset of symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease (Alladi et al., 2013; Craik, Bialystok, & Freedman, 2010). The increasing prevalence of dementia (Plassman et al., 2007)
in conjunction with promising but limited progress in the search for pharmacological interventions (Zhu et al., 2013) points to the need for alternative
approaches to disease management. Although bilingualism could not in itself
be used as an intervention in the sense that it is implausible to consider that
one could postpone societal Alzheimer’s disease by teaching foreign languages, it can nonetheless be used as a model for considering how lifestyle
factors in general contribute to cognitive reserve and be harnessed to maintain cognitive health into older age.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Three issues are a high priority for future research. The first is to define
bilingualism in such a way that the essential aspects of bilingual experience
that are responsible for these cognitive changes can be identified. The
second is to examine various bilingual contexts to extrapolate the key
features that differentiate them and determine which contexts are most
likely to support cognitive change. The third is to consider the processing
demands of different cognitive tasks and refine our notions of the specific
effect that bilingualism can be expected to exert on cognition. The effects of
bilingualism on cognition are subtle and not found in all circumstances, so
understanding how this aspect of neuroplasticity functions requires introducing more precision into all analyses. The exploration of these issues will

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

require multi-method approaches, including both behavioral and imaging
studies, co-operation among researchers operating in different contexts
with different languages, and interdisciplinary collaboration to provide
sophisticated analyses from linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics,
cognition, and neuroscience, to name a few.
The essential difficulty with this type of research is that none of the central concepts takes a simple definition. The most essential question—Who
is bilingual?—depends on establishing criteria for age of acquisition and circumstances under which a second language was acquired, both absolute and
relative levels of proficiency in the two languages, extent to which each of the
languages is used, contexts in which each language is used, and so on. It is
rare to find people who are purely monolingual in that they have never taken
a language course, traveled abroad, or spent time with speakers of another
language, or truly bilingual in that they are equally fluent in two languages
that they use regularly. The fiction of a categorical distinction between these
groups is necessary to make progress on the overall questions, but it is also
clear that differences in bilingual experience lead to different outcomes (Luk
& Bialystok, 2013). Understanding the details of how learning and using two
languages leads to modifications in cognitive ability and organization of cognitive networks will require generating more detailed analyses of relevant
individual differences factors that distinguish among bilingual experiences.
Just as individual differences matter, so too do the contexts in which individuals function. An important factor in how bilinguals use their two languages is the type and extent of support that one or both languages receive
from the community. In communities where bilingualism is considered to be
widespread and most individuals will be competent in both languages, control of language selection is less important because intrusions will not disrupt
conversation. In contrast, communities that are largely monolingual or entertain negative attitudes toward bilingualism will demand greater degrees of
language control for bilinguals in order to function effectively. These distinctions and their possible implications for both behavioral and brain consequences of bilingualism have been described by Green and Abutalebi (2013).
Similarly, there may be differential effects from other factors that are external to the individual such as similarity between the two languages or the
relation between the writing systems in the two languages that could conceivably mediate the effects of bilingualism on cognition. These issues need
to be examined in detail.
The third factor that is currently underspecified in research on the cognitive
effects of bilingualism is the nature of the tasks or processes for which these
effects may be expected to occur. It is important to delineate the range of
performances for which bilingual effects are found in conjunction with
those for which bilingualism does not matter. Various proposals for the

The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognition

7

types of task performance that are affected by bilingualism have led to
different conceptions of the mechanism that might be responsible (e.g.,
Hilchey & Klein, 2011). Even within specific processes, such as inhibition,
differences in the type of inhibition involved seem to determine whether
bilinguals will demonstrate performance advantages (Carlson & Meltzoff,
2008; Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008), and small differences in difficulty
in a single task conspire to determine whether bilinguals will outperform
their monolingual peers (Bialystok, 2006). There is much we do not know
about the situations in which bilingual performance can be expected to
demonstrate these processing advantages in executive control, but further
progress in understanding these effects requires an explicit account of those
situations.
There has always been a commonsense belief that language matters for cognition, and that it matters especially for children’s cognitive development.
Two insights from research in the past 50 years have confirmed and refined
that belief. First, the very fact that these interactions between language and
cognition occur attests to a model of mind that is holistic and deeply interactive, ruling out earlier ideas centered on modular abilities and isolated
skill development. Second, the intuitions that language experience could be
important for children’s cognitive development has been shown to be a lifelong phenomenon in which the effects of bilingualism impact cognitive processes across the life span, and acquiring another language at any age has the
potential to modify cognitive systems. This story is about bilingualism, but
it is equally a story about neuroplasticity in which the experiences in which
we engage have the potential to induce cognitive change throughout life.
This research reported in this essay was funded by grant A2559 from
National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
and grant R01HD052523 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
DEFINITION OF TERMS
Neuroplasticity. This is the view that the brain maintains the ability to continually rewire throughout life, particularly in response to experience or training. It is contrary to earlier ideas that brain networks were fixed in adulthood. The possibility of neuroplasticity has important implications for therapy, such as recovery from stroke, where targeted training can create new circuitry and restore some use of muscles that had been disabled by the stroke.
Simon Task. This is an experimental paradigm in which participants are
given a simple rule, “if you see a red square press the key on the right; if
you see a blue square press the key on the left” and are asked to respond

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

as rapidly as possible to red and blue squares that are presented on the
computer by pressing the appropriate key. The squares are presented on
either side of the display rather than in the center, so the response key
can either be on the same side as the stimulus (congruent trial) or on the
opposite side (incongruent trial). Because we automatically respond to
position information, the incongruent trials require inhibiting that natural
response to press the key required by the rule. The additional time necessary
to make these responses is the Simon effect and is a measure of executive
control.
Flanker Task. This is an experimental paradigm in which participants see a
row of stimuli, such as five arrows, and are asked to press a key as quickly
as possible to indicate what direction the central arrow is facing. The other
four arrows can either be facing in the same direction (congruent trial) or the
opposite direction (incongruent trial). The additional time needed to overcome the pull created by the flanking arrows for the incongruent trials is the
flanker effect and is a measure of executive control.

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ELLEN BIALYSTOK SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Ellen Bialystok is a Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology at York
University and an Associate Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of the
Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care. She obtained her PhD in 1976 from the
University of Toronto specializing in cognitive and language development
in children. Her current research focuses on the effect of bilingualism
on language and cognition across the life span showing modification in
cognitive systems from this experience. Her research uses both behavioral
and neuroimaging methods and examines participants who are children,
younger or older adults, as well as patients. She has published extensively in
the form of books, scientific articles, and book chapters. She is a fellow of the
Royal Society of Canada and among her awards are the Canadian Society
for Brain Behaviour and Cognitive Science Hebb Award (2011), Killam
Prize for the Social Sciences (2010), York University President’s Research
Award of Merit (2009), Donald T. Stuss Award for Research Excellence at the
Baycrest Geriatric Centre (2005), Dean’s Award for Outstanding Research
(2002), Killam Research Fellowship (2001), and the Walter Gordon Research
Fellowship (1999).
RELATED ESSAYS
Theory of Mind and Behavior (Psychology), Amanda C. Brandone
Language, Perspective, and Memory (Psychology), Rachel A. Ryskin et al.
Delusions (Psychology), Max Coltheart
Misinformation and How to Correct It (Psychology), John Cook et al.
Insight (Psychology), Brian Erickson and John Kounios
Cognitive Processes Involved in Stereotyping (Psychology), Susan T. Fiske and
Cydney H. Dupree
State of the Art in Competition Research (Psychology), Márta Fülöp and Gábor
Orosz
Language and Thought (Psychology), Susan Goldin-Meadow
Concepts and Semantic Memory (Psychology), Barbara C. Malt
Gestural Communication in Nonhuman Species (Anthropology), Simone Pika
Attention and Perception (Psychology), Ronald A. Rensink

12

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Vocal Communication in Primates (Anthropology), Katie E. Slocombe
How Form Constrains Function in the Human Brain (Psychology), Timothy
D. Verstynen
Speech Perception (Psychology), Athena Vouloumanos
Theory of Mind (Psychology), Henry Wellman


The Impact of Bilingualism
on Cognition
ELLEN BIALYSTOK

Abstract
In spite of early warnings of dire consequences of bilingualism for children’s cognitive development, research in the past 50 years has revealed that bilingualism is in
fact a positive developmental experience. These benefits were more recently shown
to extend across the life span. New research is incorporating neuroimaging to determine the brain bases of these effects and exploring the possibility that the beneficial
effects of bilingualism can compensate for degeneration of other cognitive functions
that are associated with dementia, thereby postponing symptom onset.

INTRODUCTION
The relation between language and cognition has long captured the interest
of theorists and researchers: How do language and thought interact? Is cognition limited by levels of linguistic proficiency? What are the conditions necessary to achieve high levels of language ability? Nowhere is this interaction
more dramatic or more consequential than in child development. In the first
several years of life, the emergence of both these abilities is well documented
and occurs at a breathtaking rate. And yet, in spite of ongoing philosophical debate about such possible interactions, there has always been a common belief that language matters deeply for cognitive development, and that
introducing multiple languages into children’s lives must have consequence.
For almost a century, therefore, the possibility that childhood acquisition of
more than one language could significantly affect the developing cognitive
system has been considered to be an important issue. What has changed
over time is the judgment about the outcome. With only a few exceptions,
the majority of early studies on childhood bilingualism reported superior
cognitive performance, often defined in terms of IQ scores, for monolingual
children, sometimes describing bilingual children as “inferior” or suffering
from “mental confusion” (Saer, 1923). Thus, the prevailing consensus was
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

that bilingualism created an obstacle to children’s cognitive development
(for reviews see Barac & Bialystok, 2011; Darcy, 1963; Hakuta, 1986). A significant change in this attitude began to emerge after an influential study
by Peal and Lambert (1962) in which they demonstrated better performance
on both verbal and nonverbal tests for bilingual children than for comparable monolinguals. The possibility that bilingualism might be beneficial to
children’s development was a radical departure from commonly held views.
The investigation of the effect of bilingualism on children’s cognitive development is now an active area of research, and the results are more complex
and more nuanced than the early research allowed. Research on bilingualism now informs an understanding of the relation between language and
cognition in development, the role of experience and training in cognition
across the life span, and cognitive change in older age. Thus, to a degree that
would have surprised the early researchers, the study of bilingualism provides a powerful model of the effect of experience on the mind and the role
of neuroplasticity in the development and modification of brain networks
throughout life.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The earliest systematic research indicating positive outcomes for bilingual
children focused on the development of metalinguistic awareness. The idea
was that children who were learning two languages would more rapidly
develop the formative insights about language and its structure that are
essential for high-level language use and literacy. Consistent with this
idea, studies examining children’s awareness of phonology (e.g., Ibrahim,
Eviatar, & Aharon-Peretz, 2007), syntax (e.g., Galambos & Goldin-Meadow,
1990), words (e.g., Feldman & Shen, 1971), and morphology (e.g., Cheung
et al., 2010) generally showed more advanced understanding for bilingual
children. However, such outcomes were not found in all studies, pointing
to a more complex story. Considering just phonological awareness, an
essential foundation for alphabetic literacy, subsequent research revealed
that the extent to which bilingual children demonstrated precocious development depended on the nature of the writing system (McBride-Chang,
Bialystok, Chong, & Li, 2004), the relative complexity of the orthography
(Bialystok, Majumder, & Martin, 2003), and the language of schooling (Barac
& Bialystok, 2012), to name a few. Crucially, the type of task also mattered:
Metalinguistic tasks that simply tapped knowledge of rules were performed
equivalently by monolingual and bilingual children but similar tasks that
included interfering information that needed to be ignored were performed
better by bilingual children. For example, in a grammaticality judgment
task in which children were instructed to respond to the grammaticality

The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognition

3

of sentences and ignore the meaning, all children were equally accurate in
determining that the sentence “Why is the dog bark?” contains a grammatical error so is incorrect, but bilingual children were more successful than
monolingual children in responding that the sentence “Why is the cat barking?” is grammatically correct, although it is silly (Bialystok, 1986). Thus,
bilingual children were not misled by the salient but irrelevant meaning.
The observation that the bilingual advantage in metalinguistic tasks was
confined to conditions in which attentional effort was required to ignore
distraction led to the possibility that this effect might be seen beyond the
domain of language. It is not surprising that a linguistic experience impacts
aspects of linguistic development, but it is more surprising that effects would
be found in nonverbal cognitive performance. Using paradigms similar
to those showing bilingual advantages in metalinguistic tasks, the early
research using nonverbal cognitive tasks revealed better similar performance
by monolingual and bilingual children on tasks that were based largely
on knowledge but better performance by bilingual children on tasks that
included distraction (Bialystok & Majumder, 1998). This distinction between
tasks based primary on representational knowledge and attentional control
has been maintained in recent research: Monolingual and bilingual children
perform equivalently on tests of representation, such as short-term visual
memory, but bilingual children outperform monolinguals tasks requiring
attentional control, such as the flanker task (Engel de Abreu, Cruz-Santos,
Tourinho, Martin, & Bialystok, 2012). Overall, bilingual advantages have
been reported in a range of nonverbal cognitive tasks that require attentional
control, including tests involving inhibition (Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008),
monitoring (Bialystok, 1999), creativity (Adi-Japha, Berberich-Artzi, &
Libnawi, 2010), theory of mind (Goetz, 2003), and multi-tasking (Bialystok,
2011). Together these studies converge on the interpretation that executive
control is more advanced in bilingual children than in monolinguals.
The next step in establishing this body of research was to determine
whether these effects found with children persisted into adulthood.
Although it was interesting that bilingual children had more advanced executive control than comparable monolingual children, it is also the case that
for the types of tasks used in this research, all children would eventually be
able to solve them, so there may not be any added value in mastering them
a little earlier. However, evidence for these effects in adulthood would have
greater consequence. The first study to investigate this question compared
monolinguals and bilinguals between the ages of about 30 and 80 years
old performing a Simon task, a standard measure of executive control. The
results showed reliable effects of bilingualism at all ages, providing the first
evidence that the impact of bilingualism might be more extensive and more
profound than previously thought (Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan,

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

2004). These results were subsequently replicated using different tasks,
populations, and methodologies (Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2008; Gold, Kim,
Johnson, Kryscio, & Smith, 2013; Salvatierra & Rosselli, 2010).
Why would the experience of using two languages have an impact on
nonverbal cognitive performance? The answer appears to be based on the
discovery that both languages for a bilingual are constantly activated to
some degree when the individual is using one of them. This somewhat
surprising finding has been supported by enormous amounts of evidence
from behavioral, imaging, and patient studies (see Kroll, Dussias, Bogulski,
& Valdes-Kroff, 2012, for a recent review). This constant activity from the
nontarget language should lead to frequent errors in language selection, yet
such errors are extremely rare. Therefore, there must be a mechanism that
controls selection of the correct language in the face of interference from
the activated but inappropriate alternative. An early suggestion for this
mechanism was proposed by Green (1998) in his Inhibitory Control Model.
The essential claim was that a domain-general attention system used broadly
to focus attention on relevant targets and inhibit incorrect alternatives was
applied to the problem of language selection. Research examining the neural
bases of these claims confirmed the involvement of such domain-general
processes in language selection (Abutalebi et al., 2008; Luk, Green, Abutalebi,
& Grady, 2012). The interpretation, therefore, is that the constant use of this
domain-general control system for language selection enhances that system
in bilinguals and is manifest as better performance by bilinguals on a broad
range executive control tasks, including nonverbal ones (Bialystok, Craik,
Green, & Gollan, 2009).
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Two recent developments extend this research into new domains. The first is
the incorporation of neuroimaging into these investigations and the second
is the possibility that bilingualism contributes to cognitive reserve.
A wide range of imaging techniques have been introduced to studies of
bilingualism, including structural analyses of brain volume (Mechelli et al.,
2004), functional investigations of network connectivity (Abutalebi et al.,
2012; Luk, Anderson, Craik, Grady, & Bialystok, 2010; Grady, Luk, Craik,
& Bialystok, 2015), and electrophysiological recordings of brain activity
(Rodriguez-Fornells, Rotte, Heinze, Nosselt, & Munte, 2002; Wu & Thierry,
2010). These approaches expand on existing research by identifying precise
aspects of brain function, which are modified by bilingualism. Together,
these studies document the structural and functional brain changes that
follow from extended bilingual experience and the cognitive consequences
associated with them. In this way, bilingualism has been shown to be a

The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognition

5

model for evidence of lifelong neuroplasticity, the notion that experience can
lead to persistent change in behavior that is mediated by the reorganization
of synaptic connections in specific neural circuits (Kolb et al., 2012). For
example, in the study by Luk et al. (2010), monolingual and bilingual participants performing a flanker task produced similar behavioral results in
terms of reaction time to the various conditions, but bilinguals used different
neural circuits than monolinguals when responding to incongruent trials.
Moreover, both Abutalebi et al. (2012) and Gold et al. (2013) showed that
bilinguals could achieve equivalent levels of performance as monolinguals
with less activation of the anterior cingulate cortex, a crucial part of the
executive control network, indicating more efficient performance. The
question of the extent to which neuroplasticity is available throughout life,
the types of experiences that enable brain reorganization and change, and
the possibility for exploiting such experiences to provide intervention and
training for cognitive functions that are weak or compromised through
disease or disability are exciting new directions for this research.
The second new development comes from recent studies that have reported
that bilingualism is associated with a significant delay in the onset of symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease (Alladi et al., 2013; Craik, Bialystok, & Freedman, 2010). The increasing prevalence of dementia (Plassman et al., 2007)
in conjunction with promising but limited progress in the search for pharmacological interventions (Zhu et al., 2013) points to the need for alternative
approaches to disease management. Although bilingualism could not in itself
be used as an intervention in the sense that it is implausible to consider that
one could postpone societal Alzheimer’s disease by teaching foreign languages, it can nonetheless be used as a model for considering how lifestyle
factors in general contribute to cognitive reserve and be harnessed to maintain cognitive health into older age.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Three issues are a high priority for future research. The first is to define
bilingualism in such a way that the essential aspects of bilingual experience
that are responsible for these cognitive changes can be identified. The
second is to examine various bilingual contexts to extrapolate the key
features that differentiate them and determine which contexts are most
likely to support cognitive change. The third is to consider the processing
demands of different cognitive tasks and refine our notions of the specific
effect that bilingualism can be expected to exert on cognition. The effects of
bilingualism on cognition are subtle and not found in all circumstances, so
understanding how this aspect of neuroplasticity functions requires introducing more precision into all analyses. The exploration of these issues will

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

require multi-method approaches, including both behavioral and imaging
studies, co-operation among researchers operating in different contexts
with different languages, and interdisciplinary collaboration to provide
sophisticated analyses from linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics,
cognition, and neuroscience, to name a few.
The essential difficulty with this type of research is that none of the central concepts takes a simple definition. The most essential question—Who
is bilingual?—depends on establishing criteria for age of acquisition and circumstances under which a second language was acquired, both absolute and
relative levels of proficiency in the two languages, extent to which each of the
languages is used, contexts in which each language is used, and so on. It is
rare to find people who are purely monolingual in that they have never taken
a language course, traveled abroad, or spent time with speakers of another
language, or truly bilingual in that they are equally fluent in two languages
that they use regularly. The fiction of a categorical distinction between these
groups is necessary to make progress on the overall questions, but it is also
clear that differences in bilingual experience lead to different outcomes (Luk
& Bialystok, 2013). Understanding the details of how learning and using two
languages leads to modifications in cognitive ability and organization of cognitive networks will require generating more detailed analyses of relevant
individual differences factors that distinguish among bilingual experiences.
Just as individual differences matter, so too do the contexts in which individuals function. An important factor in how bilinguals use their two languages is the type and extent of support that one or both languages receive
from the community. In communities where bilingualism is considered to be
widespread and most individuals will be competent in both languages, control of language selection is less important because intrusions will not disrupt
conversation. In contrast, communities that are largely monolingual or entertain negative attitudes toward bilingualism will demand greater degrees of
language control for bilinguals in order to function effectively. These distinctions and their possible implications for both behavioral and brain consequences of bilingualism have been described by Green and Abutalebi (2013).
Similarly, there may be differential effects from other factors that are external to the individual such as similarity between the two languages or the
relation between the writing systems in the two languages that could conceivably mediate the effects of bilingualism on cognition. These issues need
to be examined in detail.
The third factor that is currently underspecified in research on the cognitive
effects of bilingualism is the nature of the tasks or processes for which these
effects may be expected to occur. It is important to delineate the range of
performances for which bilingual effects are found in conjunction with
those for which bilingualism does not matter. Various proposals for the

The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognition

7

types of task performance that are affected by bilingualism have led to
different conceptions of the mechanism that might be responsible (e.g.,
Hilchey & Klein, 2011). Even within specific processes, such as inhibition,
differences in the type of inhibition involved seem to determine whether
bilinguals will demonstrate performance advantages (Carlson & Meltzoff,
2008; Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008), and small differences in difficulty
in a single task conspire to determine whether bilinguals will outperform
their monolingual peers (Bialystok, 2006). There is much we do not know
about the situations in which bilingual performance can be expected to
demonstrate these processing advantages in executive control, but further
progress in understanding these effects requires an explicit account of those
situations.
There has always been a commonsense belief that language matters for cognition, and that it matters especially for children’s cognitive development.
Two insights from research in the past 50 years have confirmed and refined
that belief. First, the very fact that these interactions between language and
cognition occur attests to a model of mind that is holistic and deeply interactive, ruling out earlier ideas centered on modular abilities and isolated
skill development. Second, the intuitions that language experience could be
important for children’s cognitive development has been shown to be a lifelong phenomenon in which the effects of bilingualism impact cognitive processes across the life span, and acquiring another language at any age has the
potential to modify cognitive systems. This story is about bilingualism, but
it is equally a story about neuroplasticity in which the experiences in which
we engage have the potential to induce cognitive change throughout life.
This research reported in this essay was funded by grant A2559 from
National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
and grant R01HD052523 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
DEFINITION OF TERMS
Neuroplasticity. This is the view that the brain maintains the ability to continually rewire throughout life, particularly in response to experience or training. It is contrary to earlier ideas that brain networks were fixed in adulthood. The possibility of neuroplasticity has important implications for therapy, such as recovery from stroke, where targeted training can create new circuitry and restore some use of muscles that had been disabled by the stroke.
Simon Task. This is an experimental paradigm in which participants are
given a simple rule, “if you see a red square press the key on the right; if
you see a blue square press the key on the left” and are asked to respond

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

as rapidly as possible to red and blue squares that are presented on the
computer by pressing the appropriate key. The squares are presented on
either side of the display rather than in the center, so the response key
can either be on the same side as the stimulus (congruent trial) or on the
opposite side (incongruent trial). Because we automatically respond to
position information, the incongruent trials require inhibiting that natural
response to press the key required by the rule. The additional time necessary
to make these responses is the Simon effect and is a measure of executive
control.
Flanker Task. This is an experimental paradigm in which participants see a
row of stimuli, such as five arrows, and are asked to press a key as quickly
as possible to indicate what direction the central arrow is facing. The other
four arrows can either be facing in the same direction (congruent trial) or the
opposite direction (incongruent trial). The additional time needed to overcome the pull created by the flanking arrows for the incongruent trials is the
flanker effect and is a measure of executive control.

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ELLEN BIALYSTOK SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Ellen Bialystok is a Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology at York
University and an Associate Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of the
Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care. She obtained her PhD in 1976 from the
University of Toronto specializing in cognitive and language development
in children. Her current research focuses on the effect of bilingualism
on language and cognition across the life span showing modification in
cognitive systems from this experience. Her research uses both behavioral
and neuroimaging methods and examines participants who are children,
younger or older adults, as well as patients. She has published extensively in
the form of books, scientific articles, and book chapters. She is a fellow of the
Royal Society of Canada and among her awards are the Canadian Society
for Brain Behaviour and Cognitive Science Hebb Award (2011), Killam
Prize for the Social Sciences (2010), York University President’s Research
Award of Merit (2009), Donald T. Stuss Award for Research Excellence at the
Baycrest Geriatric Centre (2005), Dean’s Award for Outstanding Research
(2002), Killam Research Fellowship (2001), and the Walter Gordon Research
Fellowship (1999).
RELATED ESSAYS
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The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognition