Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Reports of the relationship between aspects of cognitivecontrol and bilingual language experience in youngadults have been inconsistent. This study comparedperformance between monolingual and bilingual youngadults on working memory (WM) updating as ameasure of cognitive control and examined howdifferences in bilingual language experience manifestin updating performance. A letter N-back task with setsize and lure manipulations was used to measureupdating processes in the presence of increasedmemory load and interference. We expected to see aneffect of the bilingual experience on WM updating, aswell as within task variations related to the use ofdifferent updating mechanisms. While the monolingualand bilingual groups did not perform significantlydifferently, high non-English reading proficiencysignificantly predicted accuracy and reaction timewithin the bilingual group, particularly in high load,interference conditions. Results showed that youngadults categorized as bilingual in a broadly definedgroup may be difficult to uniformly compare to amonolingual group as they show large variations inperformance depending on their individual languageexperience.