A multilingual advantage, or lack thereof? : A comparative study of executive functions in bilinguals and multilinguals

Abstract: The present study aimed to examine how bilinguals and multilinguals performed in executive functioning measures as well as potential differences in performance in terms of number of languages spoken and language proficiency. A sample of 191 participants between the ages 50-75 who spoke 1-5 languages were administered six executive functioning tasks measuring inhibition and switching performance. Three different language variables were examined, namely self-reported number of languages spoken, language proficiency and recategorised number of languages spoken based on proficiency. Analyses showed a positive correlation (i.e., worse performance) between the reported number of languages spoken and the switching task “colour-shape”. This correlation remained significant when analysing the recategorised number of languages and the colour-shape task. The current results indicated no significant performance benefits of multilingualism in executive functioning tasks and showed that they may even have been disadvantaged in certain circumstances. Since correlations were only found in one switching task, no wider generalisations as to the advantages or disadvantages can be made based on the results in this study. However, no multilingual advantage as reported in previous papers was found in the present study.