Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Prior work examining executive control during the Simon task has focused on global congruency alone and/or has primarilycontrasted bilinguals with monolinguals. This is problematic for two reasons: (1) prior trial experience on current trialperformance is unaccounted for (Grundy et al., 2017) and (2) bilinguals are not a homogeneous group. Here, we examinedthe interaction between prior and current trial congruency in the Simon Task for 65 bilingual young adults who variedcontinuously in bilingual experience. Generally, current trial congruency effects were larger when the prior trial wascongruent vs. incongruent. However, as non-L1 experience increased, this interaction diminished; the overall prior trialeffect was reduced independently of age of acquisition. Crucially, neither non-L1 experience nor age of acquisitioninfluenced current trial congruency alone. Although preliminary, these results suggest that both congruency effects andbilingual experience influence performance on a non-linguistic executive control task.