PIRE fellow Anne Beatty-Martinez presents at the 57th Meeting of the Psychonomics Society.
Bilinguals are capable of efficiently negotiating task demands, especially when the task requires engagement of cognitive control. For example, bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals on the AX-Continuous Performance Task (Morales et al., 2015), which pits proactive monitoring against reactive/inhibitory control (Braver et al., 2001; Braver, 2012). While some have hypothesized that language switching experience can enhance proactive control in bilinguals (Zhang et al., 2015), others have proposed that switching will have an impact on reactive control processes (Green & Abutalebi, 2013). We conducted an aggregate analysis of the AX-CPT in monolinguals, bilinguals, and L2 learners (N=818) to investigate how language experience may modulate cognitive control processes. While bilinguals overall exhibited slower RTs relative to L2 learners and monolinguals, only bilinguals immersed in the L2 performed as or more accurately across conditions. We discuss these results with respect to language immersion and dominance, as well as codeswitching experience.