An Experimental Study On Interference Suppression And Response Inhibition Of Mongolian-Chinese Bilinguals

With the rapid development of economic globalization, bilingualism hasbeen paid more and more attention. The relationship betweenbilingualism and cognitive development is an important problem in whichpsychologists are concerned. It has been confirmed that bilingualism hasa positive effect on some cognitive processing in a large number ofprevious studies. In recent years, executive control function has been ahot topic of research about bilingual cognitive advantage. The existingevidence indicates that bilinguals are more skilled than their monolingualpeers in solving problems that require attentional control to ignore orinhibit misleading cues. In other words, bilinguals outperformmonolinguals in inhibitory control. Studies of cognitive psychology andcognitive neuroscience, however, have strongly suggested that inhibitionis not a unitary construct. There are two different kinds of inhibition thatresearchers have demonstrated: interference suppression and responseinhibition. So, how does bilingualism improve inhibitory control? Whichkind of the two has been promoted? Previous institutes didn’t cover theseproblems.Using improved Stroop paradigm and stimulus-stimulus and stimulus-response compatibility task to separate interference suppression andresponse inhibition, which are of two different components of theinhibitory function, the present research attempted to determine whetherbilingualism has different effect on the two different kind of inhibitorycontrol. Balanced Mongolian-Chinese bilinguals and Chinesemonolinguals participated in the research. Experiment1used improvedStroop paradigm to separate perception conflict and response conflict byboth stimuli to match one response; stimulus-stimulus and stimulus-response compatibility task in experiment2investigated perception conflict and response conflict by manipulating the overlapping reaction.The results are as follows:1. Both bilinguals and monolinguals responded slowly on incongruenttrials than on congruent trials, regardless of perception conflict andresponse conflict.2. Bilinguals performed better than monolinguals in perception conflictbut participants in the two groups performed similarly in responseconflict.3. Bilinguals typically outperformed monolinguals on both congruentand incongruent trials.These results indicate that bilinguals have higher levels of interferencesuppression than monolinguals but similar levels of responseinhibition, supporting the hypothesis put forward according to thebilingual inhibitory control advantage hypothesis (BICA) of Bialystokthat bilingualism only enhances interference suppression but has no effecton response inhibition. We thus propose that the inhibitory controladvantages that bilinguals enjoy are not due to a side effect of facilitatoryprocesses in a capacity-limited system. Rather, we propose that learningto keep two or more languages separate makes a separate, centralexecutive system more efficient in ignoring or inhibiting misleadingirrelevant information. In addition, the global RTs advantages ofbilinguals on both congruent and incongruent trials imply that balancedbilingual cognitive advantages may not be only inhibitory control, butalso overall improvement of executive function.