Review on Inhibition Abilities in Bilingualism Through Cognitive Tasks Analysis

Research into the possible influence of bilinguals on cognitive function and brain structure has experienced a significant surge in recent years. For decades, whether mastering a second language has any universal benefits for executive function has been a fiercely debated issue in science. Contradictory results may be attributed to various elements, such as differences in the study population, criteria for defining bilingual abilities, or differences in experimental tasks. This article reviews several literature to investigate the research questions. Some studies focus on executive function (EF), which refers to a set of cognitive processes that regulate thinking and behavior from top to bottom. The normal parts of EF are inhibition, updating, and task shifting. In this article, we reviewed inhibition abilities in bilingualism by analyzing three cognitive tasks, including the Flanker task, Simon task, and the Stroop task, to examine whether there are cognitive advantages in bilinguals. Bilingual ability is related to the performance of various tasks, especially those that evaluate children's executive function. These tasks are typically interpreted as inhibition tests, thus related to the initial explanation that evaluating inhibition plays a key role in distinguishing bilingual and monolingual cognition. The aim of the article is to analyze how bilinguals perform on inhibition through the above cognitive tasks and find that there is insufficient evidence to directly prove that bilingualism has cognitive advantages on inhibition.