Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2011 Aug;18(4):625-58. doi: 10.3758/s13423-011-0116-7.
It has been proposed that the unique need for early bilinguals to manage multiple languages while their executive control mechanisms are developing might result in long-term cognitive advantages on inhibitory control processes that generalize beyond the language domain. We review the empirical data from the literature on nonlinguistic interference tasks to assess the validity of this proposed bilingual inhibitory control advantage. Our review of these findings reveals that the bilingual advantage on conflict resolution, which by hypothesis is mediated by inhibitory control, is sporadic at best, and in some cases conspicuously absent. A robust finding from this review is that bilinguals typically outperform monolinguals on both compatible and incompatible trials, often by similar magnitudes. Together, these findings suggest that bilinguals do enjoy a more widespread cognitive advantage (a bilingual executive processing advantage) that is likely observable on a variety of cognitive assessment tools but that, somewhat ironically, is most often not apparent on traditional assays of nonlinguistic inhibitory control processes.
有人提出，早期双语者在其执行控制机制发展的同时需要管理多种语言，这可能导致他们在抑制控制过程方面具有长期的认知优势，这种优势不仅局限于语言领域。我们回顾了文献中关于非语言干扰任务的实证数据，以评估这种假设的双语抑制控制优势的有效性。我们对这些发现的回顾表明，冲突解决方面的双语优势（假设是由抑制控制介导的）充其量是零星的，在某些情况下明显不存在。从这项研究中得出的一个有力发现是，双语者在相容和不相容的试验中通常都优于单语者，而且通常幅度相似。总的来说，这些发现表明，双语者确实享有更广泛的认知优势（双语执行加工优势），这种优势可能在各种认知评估工具上都能观察到，但具有讽刺意味的是，在传统的非语言抑制控制过程的测试中往往不明显。
