Findings suggest a positive impact of bilingualism on cognition, including the later onset of dementia. However, it is not clear to what extent these effects are influenced by variations in attentional control demands in response to specific task requirements. In this study, 20 bilingual and 20 monolingual older adults performed a task-switching task under explicit task-cuing vs. memory-based switching conditions. In the cued condition, task switches occurred in random order and a visual cue signaled the next task to be performed. (...) In the memory-based condition, the task alternated after every second trial in a predictable sequence without presenting a cue. The performance of bilinguals did not vary across experimental conditions, whereas monolinguals experienced a pronounced increase in response latencies and error rates in the cued condition. Both groups produced similar switch costs and mixing costs, but bilinguals produced them with lower response latencies. The cognitive benefits of bilingualism seem not to apply to executive functions per se but to affect specific cognitive processes that involve task-relevant context processing. The present results suggest that lifelong bilingualism could promote in older adults a flexible adjustment to environmental cues, but only with increased task demands. However, due to the small sample size, the results should be interpreted with caution. (shrink)

Interest in the intersection between bilingualism and cognitive control and accessibility to neuroimaging methods have resulted in numerous studies with a variety of interpretations of the bilingual cognitive advantage. Neurocomputational Emergentism (or Neuroemergentism for short) is a new framework for understanding this relationship between bilingualism and cognitive control. This framework considers Emergence, in which two small elements are recombined in an interactive manner, yielding a non-linear effect. Added to this is the notion that Emergence can be captured in neural systems (...) using computationally inspired models. This review poses that bilingualism and cognitive control, as examined through the Neuroemergentist framework, are interwoven through development and involve the non-linear growth of cognitive processing encompassing brain areas that combine and recombine, in symbiotic and parasitic ways, in order to handle more complex types of processing. The models that have sought to explain the neural substrates of bilingual cognitive differences will be discussed with a reinterpretation of the entire bilingual cognitive advantage within a Neuroemergentist framework incorporating its neural bases. It will conclude by discussing how this new Neuroemergentist approach alters our view of the effects of language experience on cognitive control. Avenues to move beyond the simple notion of a bilingual advantage or lack thereof will be proposed. (shrink)