| Bilinguals are able to use their languages flexibly and perform a process called code-switching, which entails switching and mixing their languages. Such differences in which bilinguals use their languages allow them to incorporate their two languages as part of a communicative or social strategy in discourse. Previous research has shown that bilinguals often perform better than monolinguals in executive functioning tasks, attributed to the greater exercise of their executive control systems to manage two languages within the bilingual mind. Investigating the bilingual experience, this study examined the code-switching and sociolinguistic patterns of Cantonese-English bilingual young adults and the relationship between linguistic flexibility and cognitive flexibility. Code-switching was positively related to verbal task switching, but not to non-verbal task switching. The influence of code-switching on executive function tasks that involve language but not to those that do not involve language is interpreted as due to differential demands in executive processing. |
