Stroop task response time: A comparison between sequential bilinguals

Research on bilingual individuals provides evidence of a cognitive advantage compared with monolingual speakers. The dominant hypothesis is that language switching for bilingual individuals stimulates the executive function system helping to minimize cognitive interference and allow for multitasking situations. That is, bilingual individuals likely need to actively suppress interference from one language when they are in another language environment. Utilizing the Stroop task, a neuropsychological experiment measuring the brain’s speed and capacity to process competing information, researchers have demonstrated that bilingual speakers perform better than monolingual speakers. However, there is a paucity of research investigating the effect of order of language acquisition. This investigation examines accuracy and speed of verbal responses during a written word Stroop task for bilingual individuals who learned English first compared to bilingual individuals who learned English second. Twenty participants, ten whose language acquisition order was English then Spanish and ten whose language acquisition order was Spanish then English, completed the Stroop task in English. Preliminary results demonstrate no differences between the groups, suggesting language acquisition order does not impact the bilingual advantage in executive functioning.