Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Bilinguals’ need to monitor and inhibit non-relevantlanguages over a relevant one confers advantage in cognitivecontrol. No studies have demonstrated that the dual-languagecontrol process directly contributes to the bilingual cognitiveadvantage. We utilized a novel language control manipulationparadigm where 83 English-Chinese bilingual adultscompleted a reading and comprehension task in either single-language (low-language-control) or dual-language (high-language-control) prior to performing nonverbal executivecontrol tasks (Stroop, task-switching, and n-back). Resultsshowed that language control had significant effects onsubsequent cognitive performance, depending on whether theparticipants were regular dual language users or not. In thedual-language condition, but not the single-languagecondition, participants who used both languages regularlydemonstrated a smaller mixing cost in task-switching and agreater sensitivity in n-back detection compared toparticipants who did not. This suggests that dual languagecontrol utilizes similar resources as executive function andfrequent dual language use enhances this resource.