Integrating Bilingualism, Verbal Fluency, and Executive Functioning across the Lifespan

Abstract

Bilingual experience has an impact on an individual’s linguistic processing and general cognitive abilities. The relation between these linguistic and non-linguistic domains, in turn, is mediated by individual linguistic proficiency and developmental changes that take place across the lifespan. This study evaluated this relationship by assessing inhibition skills, and verbal fluency in monolingual and bilingual school-aged children (Experiment 1), young adults (Experiment 2), and older adults (Experiment 3). Results showed that bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in the measure of inhibition, but only in the children and older adult age groups. With regards to verbal fluency, bilingual children outperformed their monolingual peers in the letter verbal fluency task, but no group differences were observed for the young and old adults. These findings suggest that bilingual experience leads to significant advantages in linguistic and non-linguistic domains, but only at the time points when these skills undergo developmental changes.