Do bilingual advantages in domain-general executive functioning occur in everyday life and/or when performance-based measures have excellent psychometric properties?

Abstract

Psychologists have sought to understand individual differences in the ability to control thoughts, emotions, and actions during goal-directed behavior. Issues include whether the ability is unitary or componential and whether it is domain-general or task-specific. If domain-general, is it highly heritable with scant room for environmental influence or can it be enhanced by the right type of life experience or formal training? These questions have triggered one of the most heated debates in cognitive science, viz., is there a bilingual advantage in executive functioning (EF)? The empirical part of this study reports a substantially improved test of the bilingual advantage hypothesis in three respects. First, it tests for relationships between bilingualism and EF at the latent-variable level. Second, it extracts a latent-variable for performance-based measures of EF that are psychometrically strong. Third, it also includes a latent-variable based on self-rating scales of self-control/impulsivity that have enjoyed considerable success in predicting real-world outcomes. The results provide no evidence for a bilingual advantage on EF performance and a small, but significant, relationship to self-ratings. However, the relationship to self-ratings is no longer significant, when social desirability is taken into account. The correlation between the latent variables for performance-based and self-ratings was near 0, suggesting that they are separate constructs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).