SynthesisPsychonomic bulletin & review2019
Is there a bilingual advantage on interference-control tasks? A multiverse meta-analysis of global reaction time and interference cost.
Synthesis in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
46 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Does bilingualism come with linguistic costs? A meta-analytic review of the bilingual lexical deficit.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Pooled it
- Meta-Analysis Reveals a Bilingual Advantage That Is Dependent on Task and Age.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Pooled it
- Does Language Distance Modulate the Contribution of Bilingualism to Cognitive Reserve in Seniors? A Systematic Review.American journal of Alzheimer's disease and other dementiasPooled it
- Modulations of the P3b effect as a function of bilingual language experience.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Parallel contributions of socioeconomic status and bilingual experiences on executive function and the brain in young children.Brain and language · 2026Article
- Article
- Voir La Vie Sans Rose-Colored Glasses.Experimental psychology · 2025Article
- Language experience influences performance on the NIH Toolbox Cognition Battery: A cluster analysis.Humanities & social sciences communications · 2025Article
- Language and cognitive function in children: a narrative review of neural, behavioral, and developmental evidence.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
- Bilingualism modifies cognition through adaptation, not transfer.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2024Review
- The Impact of Diglossia on Executive Functions and on Reading in Arabic.Brain sciences · 2024Review
- Subjective evidence evaluation survey for many-analysts studies.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- First steps into the pupillometry multiverse of developmental science.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Bilingual disadvantages are systematically compensated by bilingual advantages across tasks and populations.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Multilingualism is associated with small task-specific advantages in cognitive performance of older adults.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- A Classification Bias and an Exclusion Bias Jointly Overinflated the Estimation of Publication Biases in Bilingualism Research.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Bilingual Language Experience and Its Effect on Conflict Adaptation in Reactive Inhibitory Control Tasks.Psychological science · 2023Article
- The impact of bilingualism in within-language conflict resolution: an ERP study.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Foreign language learning can improve response inhibition in individuals with lower baseline cognition: Results from a randomized controlled superiority trial.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2023Article
- Bilingualism can cause enhanced monitoring and occasional delayed responses in a flanker task.The European journal of neuroscience · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A contentious issue in contemporary psycholinguistics is whether bilingualism enhances executive functions. Here, we report a meta-analysis of 80 studies (253 effect sizes) comparing performance of monolinguals and bilinguals on non-verbal interference-control tasks, while examining potential moderators of effects on two dependent variables (DVs): global reaction time (RT) and interference cost. We used a multiverse approach to determine how robust conclusions were to several dataset construction and analysis decisions. In our "preferred" analysis, using a broad definition of bilinguals and standard versions of interference-control tasks, there was a very small but significant bilingual advantage for global RT (g =.13), which became non-significant once corrected for publication bias. For interference cost, there was a very small but significant bilingual advantage (g =.11). Effects were not significantly moderated by task or participant age, but were moderated by an interaction between age of second language acquisition (AoA) and the DV. Unexpectedly, larger effect sizes for interference cost were observed for studies involving bilinguals with late as opposed to early AoA. The multiverse analysis produced results largely consistent with the preferred analysis, confirming our conclusion that evidence for a bilingual advantage on interference-control tasks is weak.
Indexed as
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30815795What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.