Lexical access in bilinguals: Effects of vocabulary size and executive control

By Ellen Bialystok, Fergus I. M. Craik, G. Luk. 2008

288 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We report the results of two studies investigating lexical access in bilinguals. In Study 1, monolinguals performed better than bilinguals on tests of naming and letter fluency, but not on category fluency. When vocabulary size was considered, most of the effects disappeared or were reduced. In Study 2, a larger group of bilinguals was studied to compare the effect of vocabulary size, and a more restrictive version of the letter fluency task was used to increase executive processing involvement. In this case, bilinguals with matched vocabulary scores outperformed monolinguals on letter fluency, and bilinguals with lower vocabulary scores performed at the same level as monolinguals. The results are discussed in terms of the contributions of vocabulary size and executive control to performance on lexical retrieval tasks.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/08697af8a8cd1b09c8bf3fe239b67ea172dc13b3

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Citations in the corpus

Bilingualism: Consequences for Mind and Brain (2012, background): “Other studies with adults have shown better performance by bilinguals in naming the font color in a Stroop task [25], smaller costs in task switching [80], better ability to maintain task set in an attention task [81], and more susceptibility to negative priming, presumably because of greater inhibi”
What causes the bilingual disadvantage in verbal fluency?: The dual-task analogy (2010, background): “…MSE = 28,530.05, η2p = .82, p < .01] and, consistent with previous findings of a greater bilingual effect on semantic than on letter fluency (e.g., Bialystok et al., 2008b; Gollan et al., 2002; Rosselli et al., 2000), there was also an interaction [F(1,52) = 6.73, MSE = 28,530.05, η2p = .12, p =…”
Moving toward a neuroplasticity view of bilingualism, executive control, and aging (2014, background): “Bilingualism in older adults is thought to increase cognitive reserve (Bialystok et al., 2008a; Chertkow et al., 2010; Gollan, Montoya, Cera, & Sandoval, 2008) and in so doing leaves indelible marks on brain structure and connectivity similar to other highly specialized skills, such as musical…”
Bilingual Minds (2009, background): “…Task (Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 1983), bilinguals produced fewer correct responses (Roberts, Garcia, Desrochers, & Hernandez, 2002; Gollan, FennemaNotestine, Montoya, & Jernigan, 2007) and made more errors on a speeded version of the task (Bialystok et al., 2008a) than did monolinguals.”
A working memory, not bilingual advantage, in controlled attention (2010, result): “Some direct support for our finding comes from a recent study on the bilingual advantage in CA with adults (Bialystok, Craik, and Luk 2008 ).”
Cognitive and Linguistic Processing in the Bilingual Mind (2010, background): “A study by Bialystok, Craik, and Luk (2008b) selected”