REVIEW ARTICLE
On the Need for Theoretically Guided Approaches
to Possible Bilingual Advantages: An Evaluation
of the Potential Loci in the Language and
Executive Control Systems
Esti Blanco-Elorrieta1
and Alfonso Caramazza1,2
1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
2Center for Mind/ Brain Sciences (CIMeC), University of Trento, Trento, Italy
Keywords: bilingual advantage, cognitive control, transfer mechanism
ABSTRACT
Whether a cognitive advantage exists for bilingual individuals has been the source of heated
debate in the last decade. While empirical evidence putatively in favor of or against this
alleged advantage has been frequently discussed, the potential sources of enhanced cognitive
control in bilinguals have only been broadly declared, with no mechanistic elaboration of
where, why, and how this purported link between bilingualism and enhanced language
control develops, and how this enhancement transfers to, and subsequently improves, general
executive function. Here, we evaluate different potential sources for a bilingual advantage and
develop the assumptions one would have to make about the language processing system to be
consistent with each of these notions. Subsequently, we delineate the limitations in the
generalizations from language to overall executive function, and characterize where these
advantages could be identified if there were to be any. Ultimately, we conclude that in order
to make significant progress in this area, it is necessary to look for advantages in theoretically
motivated areas, and that in the absence of clear theories as to the source, transfer, and target
processes that could lead to potential advantages, an inconsistent body of results will follow,
making the whole pursuit of a bilingual advantage moot.
INTRODUCTION
During the last 15 years, the largest debate in the cognitive neuroscience of bilingualism has
been whether bilingual individuals develop control mechanisms that are enhanced as com-
pared to monolingual individuals (i.e., the bilingual advantage hypothesis). A rich body of lit-
erature has consistently reported that bilingualism enhances certain aspects of the executive
function (Bialystok, 2007, 2009, 2017; Bonfieni et al., 2020; Costa et al., 2009; Zhou & Krott,
2018), such as conflict monitoring (e.g., Hofweber et al., 2016) and inhibition of irrelevant
information (e.g., Costa et al., 2008; Soveri et al., 2011). However, an equally compelling
body of literature has failed to find such advantages in executive control (Paap &
Greenberg, 2013; Paap, Johnson, & Sawi, 2014; Paap et al., 2015, 2016; Paap, Sawi, et al.,
2014; von Bastian et al., 2016; Woumans & Duyck, 2015), leading an opposing group of sci-
entists to claim that there is no coherent evidence for a bilingual cognitive advantage
a n o p e n a c c e s s
j o u r n a l
Citation: Blanco-Elorrieta, E., &
Caramazza, A. (2021). On the need for
theoretically guided approaches to
possible bilingual advantages: An
evaluation of the potential loci in the
language and executive control
systems. Neurobiology of Language,
2(4), 452–463. https://doi.org/10.1162
/nol_a_00041
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00041
Supporting Information:
https://doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00041
Received: 11 December 2020
Accepted: 14 May 2021
Competing Interests: The authors have
declared that no competing interests
exist.
Corresponding Author:
Esti Blanco-Elorrieta
blancoelorrieta@fas.harvard.edu
Handling Editor:
Angela De Bruin
Copyright: © 2021
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Published under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International
(CC BY 4.0) license
The MIT Press
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An evaluation of the potential loci of a bilingual advantage
Bilingual advantage hypothesis:
The idea that as a consequence of
life-long bilingualism, bilingual
individuals develop improved
cognitive skills.
Executive control:
The set of cognitive processes that
are necessary for the cognitive
control of behavior, such as selecting
and successfully monitoring
behaviors that facilitate the
attainment of chosen goals.
Bilingual advantage:
An advantage in various aspects of
executive control including
attention, inhibition of nonrelevant
information, and conflict resolution,
derived from the experience of being
a bilingual individual and having to
constantly monitor and control two
languages.
Cognitive control:
The ability to focus on information
that is currently relevant to a
particular goal, which enables the
selection of a behavior that is
accepted as appropriate and reject a
behavior that has been deemed
inappropriate.
Inhibitory control:
The suppression of goal-irrelevant
stimuli and behavioral responses.
(Duñabeitia et al., 2014; Duñabeitia & Carreiras, 2015; Paap & Greenberg, 2013; for an in
depth review of evidence on both sides see van der Noort et al., 2019).
While the entirety of the empirical evidence and whether this evidence suffices to prove or
disprove the existence of such a bilingual advantage has been thoroughly discussed, the pre-
cise source and basis for the potential formation of these additional mechanisms in bilingual
individuals are severely underdeveloped. Why would bilingualism lead to cognitive advan-
tages? What is so special about managing two languages that could give an edge in general
cognitive abilities to individuals who can communicate in two languages?
So far, the theory of a bilingual advantage in cognitive control has been deceptively simple
(Hartsuiker, 2015). Broadly, the claim has been that because bilinguals need to constantly
monitor both languages to resolve linguistic conflict during lexical selection (e.g., Colomé,
2001; Kaushanskaya & Marian, 2007; Kroll & Stewart, 1994; Thierry & Wu, 2007), their control
mechanisms are trained to a larger extent than in their monolingual counterparts. Subsequently,
the additional training received within the language system generalizes to domain-general
cognitive control (Bialystok, 2001), leading them to show general cognitive advantages.
Within this general assertion, different researchers have tried to pinpoint the source of the
advantage to varying components of cognitive control. Specifically, the different flavors of this
view that have been considered are as follows.
(i) Bilinguals constantly activate both languages, which means that they need to subsequently
inhibit the nontarget language to successfully produce the target language (Abutalebi &
D. W. Green, 2016; D. W. Green, 1998a; D. W. Green & Abutalebi, 2013). This expe-
rience suppressing alternative elements generalizes to the effective application of inhibi-
tion in nonverbal tasks, allowing individuals to choose the correct answer amongst
competing, distracting possibilities (e.g., Simon or Flanker task; Bialystok et al., 2004).
(ii) Bilinguals constantly deal with linguistic interference. This requires them to monitor cues
in their environment that signal the intended language, and they become experts at main-
taining this target language information until updated cues signal a language switch. This
expertise generalizes to other situations that require conflict monitoring (e.g., congruent
and incongruent trials in the Simon or the Flanker tasks; Bialystok, 2006; Costa et al.,
2009; Wu & Thierry, 2017).
(iii) Bilinguals are more efficient in using monitoring mechanisms to adjust their inhibitory
control to cope with interference (i.e., a combination of (i) and (ii); Morales et al., 2013;
Morales et al., 2015). The dynamic combination of both of these mechanisms leads to
bilinguals being subsequently better at dealing with overall interference (Bialystok
et al., 2012; Costa et al., 2009).
Although slightly different in scope, all these accounts assume that language control relies
on domain-general executive control (Abutalebi et al., 2012; Blanco-Elorrieta & Pylkkänen,
2016; Craik & Bialystok, 2006; Garbin et al., 2010; cf. Calabria et al., 2019) and agree that
(i) there is a locus of conflict between competing linguistic elements within the language sys-
tem (source domain), (ii) that dealing with this conflict involves processes that generalize via
some transfer process, and (iii) that the result of this transfer is the enhancement of general
cognitive control (target domain). However, these are rather broad strokes. Currently, we lack
precise characterizations of the source domain, the transfer process, and the target domain. In
other words, we lack a theory that predicts what circumstances particularly engage language
control, an account of how skills generalize, and a theory of cognitive control that specifies
what executive functions can be improved by such generalization (Hartsuiker, 2015).
Neurobiology of Language
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An evaluation of the potential loci of a bilingual advantage
In what follows, we will address this lack of theoretical specification, and we will develop,
purely theoretically, the arguments and assumptions one would have to make at different
levels of the language and cognitive control systems for there to even be hypothetical room
for a bilingual advantage to emerge. We will refrain from discussing behavioral and neuroim-
aging data, both because given the number of contradictory findings, we would risk losing
ourselves in experimental details and deviating attention from the goal, and because doing
so is tangential to the purpose of developing the theory behind a potential bilingual advantage
(for an in-depth review of this evidence, see van der Noort et al., 2019). Thus, and specifically,
we will provide several accounts of what mechanisms could be the basis for increased engage-
ment of control in bilinguals over monolinguals at the source domain, and what assumptions
one would have to make about language organization and language production to support
each of these proposals. Subsequently, we will unpack the issues that could then emerge at
the transfer and generalization stage. In all, the aim of this article is to redirect efforts away
from empirical attempts to find a bilingual advantage that are theoretically ungrounded, and to
encourage the development of detailed theories that should guide future research to find the
location of a bilingual advantage (should there be one).
POSSIBLE OPERATIONAL LOCI AT THE LANGUAGE SELECTION LEVEL
Qualitative Differences in Language Selection as Source of the Bilingual Advantage
The first possibility that we will consider is one that relates to the claims that have been pre-
viously proposed; that is, one where the relationship between bilingualism and cognitive con-
trol processes emerges from the mechanisms devised to solve across-language competition at
the lexical selection level.
These accounts assume that there is an inherent difference in the way lexical selection is
achieved in the bilingual case that is distinct from the way in which the same purpose is ac-
complished in monolingual individuals. Fundamentally, this means that the mechanism used
to select equivalent elements across languages is qualitatively distinct from the way compa-
rable elements are picked from within a single language. According to models that posit dif-
ferent language architectures for bilingual and monolingual individuals, the key ingredient
present for bilingual communication but absent in monolingual communication is categorical
inhibition of a full system (i.e., the nontarget language). Succinctly, these theories propose that
inhibition is applied to nontarget translation equivalents to solve competition amongst lexical
alternatives and enable the selection of the target lexical element (originally the Inhibitory
Control Model, D. W. Green, 1998a, 1998b; subsequently developed in Abutalebi & D.
Green, 2007; Abutalebi & D. W. Green, 2016; D. W. Green & Abutalebi, 2013).
There are a number of unresolved questions with this proposal, however. First, if one argues
inhibition to be the most efficient mechanism to deal with, and choose from, competing rep-
resentations, presumably this should be the default mechanism for choosing amongst compet-
ing lexical representations regardless of the number of languages a person knows. In other
words, this should also be the default mechanism used by every individual to choose between
equivalent options, whether these come from within a language (e.g., to choose amongst syn-
onyms, different registers [Declerck et al., 2020], dialects [Kirk et al., 2018; Vorwerg et al.,
2019], etc.), or across languages (e.g., translation equivalents). Making this mechanism general
though, could nullify it as a viable option for the source of the bilingual advantage.
There are three ways around this issue to keep inhibition as the source of the advantage.
One is to address these concerns by developing a principled argument as to why only
Neurobiology of Language
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An evaluation of the potential loci of a bilingual advantage
bilinguals use this mechanism despite its supremacy as a lexical selection mechanism, and a
proposal regarding the point in learning a second language where bilinguals acquire this
additional device. Such a theory has not been developed, and we are currently unable to pro-
vide a solid argumentation to advocate for this possibility. Thus, we will leave this possibility
aside until such a detailed proposition is successfully developed.
The second possibility to keep inhibition as the source of the advantage and avoid answering
the previous questions, is to assume that inhibition is in fact the tool used by both monolinguals
and bilinguals to deal with conflicting representations, but that there is more competition from
across language elements as compared to within language elements, which leads to a sharper
tuning of this mechanism in bilinguals. This workaround although compelling at face value,
comes with its own set of issues. If inhibition is applied to the whole nontarget language as
inhibition-based models of lexical selection suggest (Abutalebi & D. W. Green, 2016; D. W.
Green, 1998a; D. W. Green & Abutalebi, 2013), once inhibition is applied at the highest level
of selection, then competition would no longer emerge throughout the rest of the linguistic sys-
tem during production, as everything that could potentially cause competition would have
been suppressed to begin with. Namely, once inhibition to the nontarget language has been
applied, competition in the production system is reduced to within language competitors,
equalizing demands on monolingual and bilingual lexical selection. Hence, to make this pos-
sibility work, one would have to adopt the following postulates: (i) the language system operates
on the basis of inhibition, (ii) executive control is intrinsically and definitionally a process of
suppression, and (iii) the first step of suppression is so strong that it is enough to cause an
advantage in and of itself, despite it facilitating language selection throughout the rest of the
language production system. However, there is currently no evidence suggesting that the first
step of inhibition could be that overarching, and the general consensus in the literature is that
executive control involves much more than just inhibition; hence it does not really follow that
from a single step of inhibition a general advantage in cognitive control would emerge.
The third possibility to maintain inhibition at the center of the advantage, and avoid
answering the first set of questions and the adoption of these ungrounded tenets, is to assume
that inhibition is in fact the tool used both by monolinguals and bilinguals during lexical
selection, that there is more competition from across than within language elements, but that
the inhibition to solve this competition is applied at the individual word level as opposed to at
the whole language level (as proposed in the distinction between local vs. global inhibition;
e.g., Branzi et al., 2016; Guo et al., 2011). This would mean that it is not the case that once
inhibition is applied at the whole language level, competition is eliminated throughout the
language system, but rather, that inhibition needs to be applied and reapplied at every point
of the discourse, making it a recurrent process that would improve inhibitory skills in bilingual
individuals. However, while the application of inhibition at each element independently can
be useful to explain laboratory tasks where participants are required to randomly switch lan-
guages in interleaved trials, the interconnectedness of speech and planning of linguistic struc-
tures above the single-word unit during natural communication makes it challenging to extend
this proposal to such contexts. Presumably, in the process of natural utterance planning, an
individual would either inhibit every element in the nontarget language, or would inhibit none
and allow for the free selection of elements of either language to enable rampant code-
switching, but it is unclear what circumstances could dominate the communicative context
to force speakers to inhibit each word in turn and apply and reapply inhibition at each step
of the discourse. Thus, although this possibility could perhaps work within the context of
experimental tasks, it does not seem to stand the scrutiny of generalization to natural commu-
nication. Since the advantage in bilingual individuals needs to necessarily emerge from a
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An evaluation of the potential loci of a bilingual advantage
mechanism applied during natural language use, we are also unable to place this mechanism
as the source of a real bilingual advantage.
To recapitulate, we have evaluated four different possibilities that place inhibition as the
distinctive feature of bilingual language selection and central locus of the advantage of bilin-
gual individuals. Although all appealing at a surface level, once exposed to deeper examina-
tion, qualitative differences between monolingual and bilingual language selection do not
seem to satisfy the premises required for them to lead to an enhancement of cognitive mech-
anisms in bilinguals. Consequently, we will now proceed to evaluate alternatives that are not
based on categorical differences between monolingual and bilingual language organization
but rather on quantitative differences between the two.
Quantitative Differences in Language Organization
If one assumes that both monolingual and bilingual language systems work on the same prin-
ciples (e.g., Blanco-Elorrieta & Caramazza, 2021), in order for the bilingual advantage to
emerge within the language system, two premises ought to be true. First, there needs to be
a lexical selection process that is shared across monolingual and bilingual individuals that
requires the involvement of executive control. Second, this process needs to be more often
or more strongly recruited in bilinguals than monolinguals such that this increased use ulti-
mately sharpens these control abilities in bilinguals. Although currently there is no evidence
to suggest that in fact executive control needs to mediate lexical selection, and recent models
suggest that levels of activation could suffice to successfully pick target elements (e.g., Blanco-
Elorrieta & Caramazza, 2021), we will develop the scenarios under which those assumptions
could theoretically lead to bilingual advantages.
One possibility to satisfy both of these premises is to adopt Roelofs’ notion of competition
(Roelofs, 1992), which asserts that a lexical choice becomes harder the more similar two com-
peting alternatives are, and assume that executive control is needed to untie this similarity and
make a fine-grained choice amongst remarkably similar options. In the case of monolingual
individuals, this competition is at its highest for synonyms or near-synonyms (Lachman, 1973;
Levelt et al., 1991; Peterson & Savoy, 1998; Vitkovitch & Tyrrell, 1995). Bilingual individuals
additionally face these hard choices when presented with cognates and translation equivalents
(Hartsuiker & Notebaert, 2010; Ivanova & Costa, 2008; Marian & Spivey, 2003; Sarkis &
Montag, 2021), particularly given that both languages are constantly coactivated (e.g.,
Blumenfeld & Marian, 2013; Gullifer et al., 2013; Martin et al., 2009), which exponentially
multiplies their need to rely on this type of executive function if lexical selection would in fact
be mediated by executive control.
Additionally, if one assumes a model of lexical selection where there is independent, cas-
cading activation (e.g., Caramazza, 1997), this increase in harder choices for bilinguals would
not be reduced to the lexical level, but rather it would ripple through and reproduce in the rest
of the linguistic levels. Thus, while monolinguals are limited in terms of the opportunities for
having competing phonemes, lexical items, and syntactic formulations to certain synonyms,
register or dialectal variations, bilinguals would be faced with quasi-equivalent elements at
almost every point in the discourse across all of these levels.
Consequently, this proposal could satisfy both theoretical requirements in that it acknowl-
edges that both monolingual and bilingual speakers use the same mechanisms for the same
kinds of qualitative choices, but recognizes that the sheer number of these types of choices a
bilingual has to face are exponentially higher, and this larger number of choices requiring con-
trol that bilinguals have to make constitutes the locus of increased control during bilingual
Neurobiology of Language
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An evaluation of the potential loci of a bilingual advantage
language selection. The prediction that would naturally follow is that bilinguals would in prin-
ciple be more efficient at lexical selection, both in their first and their second language.
However, it is possible that this improved retrieval would be behaviorally undetectable, be-
cause bilingual individuals would continue to suffer from the increased competition from the
second language that leads to sharper tuning of executive control to begin with. Importantly,
this proposal hinges upon empirically showing that (i) the more similar two elements are, the
harder selection becomes (Roelofs, 1992), and (ii) the selection process between these highly-
similar alternatives requires the mediation of executive control. Although these two tenets are
so far empirically unproven, they could at least theoretically work.
However, even if one were to believe in the correctness of those two assumptions, there is a
premise that is still missing from this proposal, and that is that there ought to be some external
constraint determining which is the correct and which is the incorrect option amongst the
competitors for one to argue that some control is required to mediate these choices. This re-
quirement follows because if either one of the quasi-equal candidates were an equally valid
choice for production, elements could be stochastically chosen without any need for mecha-
nisms making fine-grained selections.
One possibility to straightforwardly implement this external constraint is through the linguis-
tic demands posited by the interlocutor’s linguistic profile (i.e., the need to choose the option
that the interlocutor will understand). In what follows, we will evaluate the three conversational
scenarios that have been previously delineated for bilinguals—dense code-switching contexts,
dual-language contexts, and single-language contexts (D. W. Green & Abutalebi, 2013)—and
assess whether the requirement for executive function to mediate selection would uphold in
each of them.
(a) In dense code-switching contexts, both languages can be used with all interlocutors, as
everyone shares the linguistic profile of the speaker. This allows bilinguals to select the
production language freely, without needing to constrain it based on audience consider-
ations. Consequently, there would be no need to make targeted choices that executive
control needs to mediate. In other words, even if there truly were a bilingual advantage,
and the source of this advantage would in fact lie in the quantity of executive-control me-
diated choices bilinguals need to make, bilinguals who are most frequently immersed in
this type of context would not develop such advantages because the freedom to choose
any available element would mean that they do not often need to make these fine-grained
choices.
(b) In dual-language contexts both languages are also used, but each of them is used with
different individuals (i.e., each interlocutor or group of interlocutors exclusively under-
stands one of the possibilities available to the speaker). Given the assumption that ex-
ecutive control mediates the selection amongst highly similar choices, it would follow
that such control would be required in these scenarios to ensure that at each point in the
discourse the element that the interlocutor will understand is selected from the pool of
competing candidates. Thus, this context could fulfill all the premises for it to lead to the
development of a bilingual advantage provided that the assumption that executive con-
trol mediates this kind of selection holds true.
(c) Last, in single-language contexts, all interlocutors understand only one of the languages
available to the speaker. Hence, the premise is met that an external factor will guide pos-
sible choices in this context. However, and critically, the assumption is that executive
control will mediate candidate selection to untie and choose between equally available,
highly similar options. Given sufficient background context or experience with a given
Dual-language context:
A conversational context in which
one language is utilized with at least
one interlocutor and a different
language has to be utilized with at
least one other interlocutor.
Dense code-switching context:
A conversational context in which
two languages are used, but all
interlocutors in the conversation
understand both languages, thus
imposing no constraints on language
choice.
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An evaluation of the potential loci of a bilingual advantage
individual, the activation levels for the language that is not shared with the listener will be
much lower than those for the shared language. Consequently, the two choices will not be
similarly available for selection, which means that there would no longer be a need for
executive control to mediate those choices. An exception in this context could be the case
of highly unbalanced bilinguals required to produce their second language. Since native
language elements will have higher activation levels by default, increased activation of
their second language when attempting to produce said language could balance activa-
tion levels, leading to equally available candidates and the subsequent need for mediation
of executive function. In all, even though theoretically all the requirements to develop a
bilingual advantage could be met in the single-language context, it would seem that in
practice only very specific combinations of language proficiencies and context would
actually satisfy such premises in this context.
Importantly, bilingualism being a dynamic life experience, bilingual individuals do not cat-
egorically belong to one of these three contexts but rather they will find themselves more or less
often in each of these communicative scenarios depending on a variety of social backgrounds
and experiences. Here we argue, in line with previous proposals (Blanco-Elorrieta & Pylkkänen,
2018; Kaan et al., 2020), that this experience will modulate the extent to which they may be
more or less likely to develop the purported advantages in the source domain, if both required
premises—(i) that a lexical choice becomes harder the more similar two competing alternatives
are, and (ii) that executive control is needed to untie this similarity and make a fine-grained
choice amongst highly similar options—hold.
THE ISSUE OF TRANSFER AND GENERALIZATION
The previous section unpacked the theoretical possibilities for the source of a potential bilin-
gual advantage within the language system. However, even if the two assumptions required for
our best proposal would empirically hold, that would still only cover the grounds for where
additional training in bilinguals could emerge. To make informed predictions about whether
this would translate into a bilingual advantage in general cognitive control, we still need a char-
acterization of the relationship between executive control as applied in language production
and general-purpose cognitive control, and as well an understanding of cognitive control gen-
erally, which in and of itself has been elusive to characterize. As Ridderinkhof et al. (2011) point
out, “perhaps due to its descriptive rather than mechanistic conceptualization, cognitive con-
trol has long remained an intractable concept” (p. 174). That is to say—we do not exactly know
how to measure cognitive control and what even cognitive control is, beyond an enumeration
of functions that may fall under its umbrella (e.g., inhibition, switching, and monitoring).
In the absence of evidence that illuminates the true nature of cognitive control, there are two
main possibilities to consider. On the one hand, it could be that there is a unique central engine
of executive control, which is blind to the specific task that it is applied to. Thus, this mecha-
nism would be engaged in every task that requires executive control, regardless of the specifics
of the task. Applied to the context of language, this proposal would align with accounts where
language control relies on domain-general cognitive control (Abutalebi et al., 2012; Blanco-
Elorrieta & Pylkkänen, 2016; Craik & Bialystok, 2006; Declerck et al., 2021; Garbin et al.,
2010; cf. Calabria et al., 2019). Adopting this notion of a unique executive control mechanism
would mean that improvement in one task would automatically result in enhancements in
every other task that also requires cognitive control, since both tasks would rely on the same
unique executive function machinery. Adopting such a vision of executive function would
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An evaluation of the potential loci of a bilingual advantage
predict that ultimately, if both language use and violin playing required the engagement of this
central cognitive control, training executive function during language production (e.g., by
being bilingual) would automatically imply improvement in violin playing.
Alternatively, it could be that there is a central instance of executive control that is then
exercised specifically within the context of particular applications (i.e., both language use
and violin playing require executive function, but critically they constitute fundamentally
distinct applications of it). This proposal aligns instead with accounts that suggest that there is
such a thing as language-specific control (e.g., Abutalebi et al., 2008; Calabria et al., 2012). If
this were the case, then one would have to determine the extent to which training in one specific
application of cognitive function transfers and generalizes to the main executive function
engine, such that it could subsequently improve the rest of the specialized applications of such
control. In consequence, under this account, there would need to be a detailed account of how
transfer works, and how exactly language practice would lead to improvements in the rest of the
tasks that require cognitive control.
Importantly neither the transfer nor the generalization issue are restricted to the bilingual
advantage, but rather they are a recurrent topic of discussion in research that tries to unpack
cognitive benefits derived from a range of other tasks. In different historical waves, there have
been attempts to establish direct causal benefits to one cognitive domain from practice in
another task, including, for example, whether music practice improves math skills or whether
reading ability improves memory. In recent years, for instance, there has been an explosion of
research on the potential benefits of video-game playing, with empirical results showing that
video-game players outperform non–video-game players on tests of attention control, working
memory, and executive control (Blacker & Curby, 2013; Cain et al., 2012; Castel et al., 2005;
Chisholm & Kingstone, 2012; Colzato et al., 2013; C. S. Green & Bavelier, 2003, 2006, 2007;
McDermott et al., 2014), only to ultimately conclude under more thorough examination that in
most cases, training only improves the specific skill one is training (e.g., Ericsson & Charness,
1994; Gobet et al., 2001; Gobet, 2015; Hambrick et al., 2017; Powers et al., 2013; Redick
et al., 2017; Sala et al., 2018; Sala & Gobet, 2019; Schellenberg, 2020; Simons et al., 2016;
Unsworth et al., 2015).
The consequences of this finding in other cognitive domains are nontrivial. First, it would
suggest that in fact there is no single, unified executive function that is equally applied to every
task that requires cognitive control, and consequently one would have to explore possible
routes for transfer and generalization. Second, if across other domains of cognition, the con-
clusion is that there is no real generalization of skills, one would either have to argue an ex-
tremely convincing case for why language would be different than the rest of the cognitive
skills, or the search for advantages in cognitive control would have to be limited to the exact
skill that the theory of language one ascribes to posits as the root of the advantage at the source
domain. It follows then that looking for a bilingual advantage necessitates a clearly articulated
theory of language selection and a characterization of the specific loci for where the advan-
tage could lie. In this paper, we conducted that exercise by carefully considering the prevalent
models of lexical selection, and we conclude that the only possible source for an advantage at
the language level that is theoretically possible is one where the lexical choices become
harder the more similar two competing alternatives are (Roelofs, 1992), and where executive
control is needed to untie this similarity and make a fine-grained choice amongst highly
similar options. In the absence of empirical evidence supporting these two tenets though,
one resorts back to models where the highest level of activation is sufficient for lexical selec-
tion in monolingual and bilingual individuals (e.g., Blanco-Elorrieta & Caramazza, 2021),
which would lead to no theoretical grounds for an advantage to emerge at the source domain.
Neurobiology of Language
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An evaluation of the potential loci of a bilingual advantage
CONCLUSION
The study of a potential bilingual advantage in cognitive function has dominated the field of
bilingual research in the last decades, yet the empirical basis for this hypothesis remains shaky
(Hartsuiker, 2015; Paap et al., 2016). These inconsistencies may emerge to a large extent
because this endeavor has involved attempts to find advantages in every subcomponent of
executive control without a particular theory of where these potential advantages would
emerge from or how and why they would have transferred to general cognitive control.
Here, we laid out different possibilities for the potential loci of the bilingual advantage at the
source domain and evaluated what assumptions one would have to make about the lexical
system of bilingual individuals for each of them to hold. After careful consideration, we are left
with only one possibility that could theoretically work, even though it still requires assumptions
that are not yet empirically proven, and would thus require experimental confirmation. Further,
we find that even if these were to hold, the convergent empirical evidence from other fields
suggests that the generalization could only really apply to the exact same skill in another
domain. In all, we advocate that in order for progress to be made in this field, we need theo-
retically guided approaches that rely on detailed accounts of language selection and transfer to
cognitive control. Even though the empirical evidence so far may more convincingly support
postulates that there is in fact no cognitive advantage for bilinguals (Duñabeitia et al., 2014;
Duñabeitia & Carreiras, 2015; Paap & Greenberg, 2013; Paap, Johnson, & Sawi, 2014,
2015, 2016; Paap, Sawi, et al., 2014; von Bastian et al., 2016; Woumans & Duyck, 2015),
the evidence showing bilingual advantages in some contexts and tasks (Bialystok, 2007,
2009, 2017; Bonfieni et al., 2020; Costa et al., 2009; Zhou & Krott, 2018) merits consideration
of the fundamental claim. However, we may need to take a step back and develop and reassess
the theory from which these advantages could stem in order to be able to develop the targeted
approaches that may enable us to find them.
FUNDING INFORMATION
Alfonso Caramazza, Harvard University, Award ID: Provostial fund.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Esti Blanco-Elorrieta: Conceptualization: Lead; Writing – original draft: Lead; Writing – review
& editing: Equal. Alfonso Caramazza: Conceptualization: Equal; Resources: Lead; Supervision:
Lead; Writing – review & editing: Equal.
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