ArticlePsychology and aging2021
Older bilinguals reverse language dominance less than younger bilinguals: Evidence for the inhibitory deficit hypothesis.
Article in Psychology and aging, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 20 citations in OpenAlex.
- The prevalence of functional disability and its impact on older adults in the ASEAN region: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Epidemiology and health · 2022Pooled it
- Language switches can be monitored but not fully controlled: Eye-tracking evidence for syntax-driven language control.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Language dominance effects on verbal list memory in older Spanish-English bilinguals.Neuropsychology · 2026Article
- Switching-back versus switching-out: Language context reveals a novel aging deficit in proactive bilingual language control.Cognition · 2026Article
- Syntax drives default language selection in bilingual connected speech production.Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2025Article
- Machine Learning Predictions of Recovery in Bilingual Poststroke Aphasia: Aligning Insights With Clinical Evidence.Stroke · 2025Article
- Predicting naming scores from language history: A little immersion goes a long way, and self-rated proficiency matters more than percent use.Bilingualism (Cambridge, England) · 2024Article
- Revisiting which language declines more in Spanish-English bilinguals with Alzheimer's disease: Longitudinal decline patterns on the multilingual naming test.Neuropsychologia · 2024Article
- The MINT Sprint 2.0: A picture naming test for detection of naming impairments in Alzheimer's disease and in preclinical AD.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2024Article
- Inhibitory control of the dominant language: Reversed language dominance is the tip of the iceberg.Journal of memory and language · 2023Article
- Is there proactive inhibitory control during bilingual and bidialectal language production?PloS one · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
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Abstract
Inhibitory control is thought to play a key role in how bilinguals switch languages and may decline in aging. We tested these hypotheses by examining age group differences in the reversed language dominance effect-a signature of inhibition of the dominant language that leads bilinguals to name pictures more slowly in the dominant than the nondominant language in mixed-language testing blocks. Twenty-five older and 48 younger Spanish-English bilinguals completed a cued language-switching task. To test if inhibition is applied at the whole-language or lexical level, we first presented one set of pictures repeatedly, then introduced a second list halfway through the experiment. Younger bilinguals exhibited significantly greater reversed language dominance effects than older bilinguals (who exhibited nonsignificant language dominance effects). In younger bilinguals, dominance reversal transferred to, and was even larger in, the second list (compared to the first). The latter result may suggest that inhibition is partially offset by repetition in ways that are not yet fully understood. More generally, these results support the hypotheses that aging impairs inhibitory control of the dominant language, which young bilinguals rely on to switch languages. Additionally, inhibition is applied primarily at the whole-language level, and speculatively, this form of language control may be analogous to nonlinguistic proactive control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
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