Is adaptation the new ‘bilingual advantage’?

Published on January 1, 2025

For much of the past two decades, a debate has dominated research on bilingualism and cognition: do bilingual individuals have a cognitive advantage over monolinguals and, if so, what is the source of this advantage? Previous proposals have posited that transfer is the source of this advantage. According to this proposal, there is some skill (i.e., inhibition) that is developed through the experience of being bilingual that then generalizes to nonlinguistic tasks requiring the same skill. For instance, bilinguals with better inhibition skills would perform better in general domain tasks that require inhibition (e.g., choosing the correct answer among competing, distracting possibilities [1]).

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