title: The effects of bilingualism on conflict monitoring, cognitive control, and garden-path recovery.
abstract: Bilinguals demonstrate benefits on non-linguistic tasks requiring cognitive control-the regulation of mental activity to resolve information-conflict during processing. This "bilingual advantage" has been attributed to the consistent management of two languages, yet it remains unknown if these benefits extend to sentence processing. In monolinguals, cognitive control helps detect and revise misinterpretations of sentence meaning. Here, we test if the bilingual advantage extends to parsing and interpretation by comparing bilinguals' and monolinguals' syntactic ambiguity resolution before and after practicing N-back, a non-syntactic cognitive-control task. Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on a high-conflict but not a no-conflict version of N-back and on sentence comprehension, indicating that the advantage extends to language interpretation. Gains on N-back conflict trials also predicted comprehension improvements for ambiguous sentences, suggesting that the bilingual advantage emerges across tasks tapping shared cognitive-control procedures. Because the overall task benefits were observed for conflict and non-conflict trials, bilinguals' advantage may reflect increased cognitive flexibility.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, Biology-Psychology Bldg., College Park, MD 20742, USA; Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, University of Maryland, Biology-Psychology Bldg., College Park, MD 20742, USA. Electronic address: teubnera@musc.edu.
authors.forename: Susan E
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Teubner-Rhodes
authors.affiliation: Center for Advanced Study of Language, University of Maryland, 7005 52nd Ave, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
authors.forename: Alan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mishler
authors.affiliation: Center for Advanced Study of Language, University of Maryland, 7005 52nd Ave, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
authors.forename: Ryan
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Corbett
authors.affiliation: Grup de Recerca en Cognició i Llenguatge (GRECIL), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Rambla de Poble Nou, 156, 08018 Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Llorenç
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Andreu
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona, Passeig de la Vall d'Hebron, 171, 08035 Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Monica
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sanz-Torrent
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
authors.forename: John C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Trueswell
authors.affiliation: Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, University of Maryland, Biology-Psychology Bldg., College Park, MD 20742, USA; Center for Advanced Study of Language, University of Maryland, 7005 52nd Ave, College Park, MD 20742, USA; Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, Lefrak Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
authors.forename: Jared M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Novick
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D011897:Random Allocation; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Bilingualism; Cognitive control; Memory; Sentence comprehension; Stimulus ambiguity