A Study Of The Cognitive Advantage And Impact Factors On The Late,Non-balanced Bilingual

In recent years,the researchers payed more attention on the bilingual cognitive advantage.Some studies have found that bilinguals have advantages in the executive control,including inhibition,monitoring and switching.The early,balanced bilinguals acted as the participants in most of the previous researchers rather than the late,non-balanced bilinguals.In this study,we will investigated the bilingual cognitive advantage of the latter.Thirty nine Chinese monolinguals and thirty five late,non-balanced bilinguals performed three computerized executive control(EF)tasks(Simon,Attention Network Task(ANT)and color-shape switching task)that measure the EF components: inhibition,monitoring and switching.Each task had two conditions: the easy and the hard condition.The results showed that:(1)In the Simon task,there were significant main effect of task and trials consistency.However,neither the main effect of language nor the difference of Simon effect between two participants groups was significant.But the bilinguals had the smaller Simon effect in hard condition.(2)In the easy ANT task,only the main effect of trials consistency was significant.There were no significant main effect of language and task,and the difference of ANT effect between two groups was not significant,either.In hard task,the main effect of trial consistency and language were significant.Despite of the main effect of task and the difference of ANT effect between two groups were not significant,the monolinguals responded faster than the bilinguals.(3)In the color-shape switching task,the main effect of trial and clue(difficulty)were significant,but the main effect of language was not significant.The switching costs were significant between two groups and the bilinguals had the smaller switching cost than the monolinguals.There was no significant difference of the mixed costs between two groups.In summary,the conclusions of this study as follows:(1)Late,non-balanced bilinguals showed advantages in executive control,which appeared in the Simon and the color-shape switching tasks.Therefore,for the late,non-balanced bilinguals,the cognitive advantages showed in some components of the executive control instead of all of it.(2)The difficulty of the task would influence the late,non-balanced bilinguals' executive control.They were easily showing this advantage in tasks with the higher cognitive demanding.