Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent literature indicates that the effects of bilingualism on executive control functions need to be examined with a more comprehensive characterization of bilingualism, and with the use of multiple measures of executive control (Backer and Bortfeld, 2021,Paap and Greenberg, 2013). In the current study, we operationalize bilingualism using a set of continuous variables related to language knowledge and use. We exam- ine the effects of language proficiency, immersion, language dominance, diversity of language use and language switching on individuals’ performance on tasks measuring inhibition. 66 Hindi-English bilinguals responded to the LHQ3, BSWQ and completed four inhibition tasks online. Inhibition tasks varied on the type of conflict (stimulus-stimulus/ stimulus-response) and the type of stimuli (arrows/ words). Bilingualism related variables failed to predict performance on any of the four tasks when included in linear regression models. We also conducted Bayesian regression analyses to validate the evidence for the lack of an effect. For three out of four tasks, we find BF10 (Bayes Factor indicating evidence for the alternate over null) of less than 1. Our data were most likely for the case where the null is true. Posterior odds for the null increased by fac- tors of 13.1, 10.9, 4.3 and 11.8 for the four tasks, respec- tively. However, for the nonverbal Vertical Stroop Task, the best model contained only multilingual diversity scores as a predictor. We fail to find adequate evidence for the effects of bilingualism on inhibitory performance. We find that the effects of bilingualism do not appear to be task-specific or de- pendent on the type of conflict involved in a task, as previously suggested.(Blumenfeld and Marian, 2014) and conclude that it is unlikely that behavioral effects of bilingualism on inhibition exist.