Modulatory Effects of Language Context on Executive Functioning in Multilinguals

The advantages of bilingualism on executive functioning have received intense attention over the past decade. However, characterizing what makes someone bilingual versus monolingual is complicated. This study explores the impact of multilingualism on flanker task performance, using the Multilingual Language Diversity (MLD) score to measure the degree of multilingualism. The impact of linguistic distance was also investigated by varying language pairs between English-Mandarin and English-Malay. Experiment 1 found that higher MLD scores predicted better performance on the flanker task, but only in mixed-language context (e.g., English and Mandarin) and not in single-language contexts (e.g., English or Mandarin only). In experiment 2, with a more linguistically similar language pair (i.e., English and Malay), L2 Proficiency, but not MLD scores, predicted better performance in Malay-only context. The study suggests that the impact of multilingualism on cognitive function can be affected by language contexts, language proficiency and degree of multilingualism.