Bilingualism, executive function, and beyond: Questions and insights ed. by Irina A. Sekerina et al. (review)

The focus of Bilingualism, executive function, and beyondis the hypothesis that managing two languages requires domain-general executive functioning (EF) and that this ubiquitous practice leads to an enhancement of cognitive control. This hypothesis was first challenged in the context of a failed replication by Morton and Harper in 2007, and the ensuing debate continued to pick up steam for fifteen years and counting. The dominant view expressed throughout the book is that bilinguals do adapt to the demands of managing multiple languages and that these adaptations affect and enhance general control mechanisms. However, each bilingual's experience is distinctive, as determined by the specific languages acquired, the age of acquisition, the proficiency attained, the amount of use, and the pattern of use. The latter emphasizes a distinction between single-language contexts, where a single language dominates in each context (e.g. English at school, Spanish at home), and dual-language contexts, where there is frequent language switching depending upon changes in conversational partners or topics. With the further refinement and adoption of the theoretical framework that general cognitive control is best viewed as a set of interrelated component processes, one comes to appreciate that different types of bilinguals will recruit and strengthen different component processes of EF. Thus, another major theme of the book is that the hypothesis of a bilingual advantage in EF (the bilingual advantage hypothesis) cannot be tested with a simple comparison between bilinguals and monolinguals but must take the type of bilingual into account; this requires advances in the methods used to measure different facets of bilingualism and in the tasks used to measure different components of EF. The book does a good job of laying out this agenda, although there is no attempt to integrate the separate chapters into something like a continuous narrative that tells this story. This is not surprising given the book's origin, as briefly described next.

The book's genesis was a 2015 NSF-sponsored workshop held at the CUNY Graduate Center. Eleven papers from that workshop were published in 2016 as a special issue of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. They constitute a little more than half of the contents of this volume. Nine posters from the workshop were written up as articles and form the rest of the book. Unfortunately, the time between the development of these papers and their appearance in this book means that the book was not able to benefit from advances in research and theory over the intervening years. During this time the vigorous debate about the bilingual advantage hypothesis has grown more intense, as new empirical studies and reviews seem to appear by the dozen every month.

A potential weakness of the book is that it will mislead a new generation of researchers into adopting the view that evidence has confirmed the hypothesis that bilingualism enhances components of general EF. In the remainder of this review I make the case that the narrative is too rosy and incomplete. The critique is organized with respect to four issues: (i) new meta-analyses paint a very pessimistic picture for the bilingual advantage hypothesis, (ii) the presumption that domain-general executive control exists may be false, (iii) despite intensive effort, the necessary and sufficient conditions for generating bilingual advantages are nowhere in sight, and (iv) Ellen Bialystok's (e.g. 2016) program for separating signal from noise took some dubious steps and has not been successful.

M eta-analyses do not support the hypothesis

The book presents a distorted and incomplete view of the evidence because it fails to take into account the recent march of formal metaanalyses (von Bastian et al. 2017, Lehtonen et al. 2018, Donnelly et al. 2019, Paap 2019, Gunnerud et al. 2020, Lowe et al. 2021, Monnier et al. 2021) that cast the relevant research in a new light. A broad summary is...