Proactive Semantic Suppression as a Form of Linguistic Control in Bilinguals

Current literature is divided on the topic of the bilingual advantage, or the question of whether bilingualism confers a distinct advantage in executive control, specifically in cognitive processes like inhibitory control and task-switching (Bialystok et al., 2005; Paap & Greenberg, 2013). This study seeks to provide more insight into underlying mechanisms of cognitive control in bilinguals compared to monolinguals by investigating proactive linguistic control, the bilingual ability to activate one linguistic system while suppressing irrelevant semantic information in the other (Declerck & Koch, 2023; Rainey et al., 2021). The Stroop task, a widely used test for executive functioning, was employed as the cognitive performance measure for its inclusion of semantic information and its demonstration of inhibition of interfering information (Stroop, 1992). Bilinguals were cued to preemptively switch into their native language, thus activating proactive linguistic control. It was hypothesized that bilinguals would exhibit better performance on the Stroop task as measured by response time, accuracy, or both. Contrary to the original hypothesis, no significant differences were found between the bilingual and monolingual groups. Furthermore, bilingual performance was not moderated by linguistic distance, or how dissimilar their native language was to English (Chiswick & Miller, 2005). The results may contribute to the growing body of research in opposition to the bilingual advantage, though weaknesses in study design and insufficient power due to sample size may obscure the underlying trend in the population.