BILINGUAL DISADVANTAGE IN A LINGUISTIC SIMON TASK

Back to Page Authors: Ana Rivera, Lise Abrams, Lori Altmann

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Keywords: bilingualism, Simon Task, cognition, language

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Abstract: Objective: The purpose of our study was to examine the effects of bilingualism on performance in an implicit and explicit Simon task. Participants and Methods: Participants included 56 bilingual and 57 monolingual healthy young adults. Participants completed linguistic and nonlinguistic Simon tasks with either implicit vs explicit instructions. Attending to the language/orientation was either implicit (when the task required naming the color) or explicit (when the task required naming the language or orientation). The linguistic stimuli were the color words ‘BLUE’, ‘GREEN’, ‘AZUL’, or ‘VERDE’ shown in black font, whereas the nonlinguistic stimuli comprised of blue and green rectangles. The directions for the implicit Simon task instructed participants to name the color of the presented stimuli, ignoring the completing conflict of either the language (English or Spanish) or orientation (vertical or horizontal). The directions for the explicit Simon instructed participants to indicate the language or orientation, ignoring the competing conflict of the color of the stimuli. The dependent variables were the Simon Effect (Incongruent reaction times (RT) – Congruent RT) and the Global effect (mean of Congruent and Incongruent RTs). Results: Results showed that bilinguals were significantly disadvantaged on the Simon effect when the stimuli was in written form (linguistic stimuli) for both implicit (naming the color) and explicit tasks (naming the language/orientation). Bilinguals had a larger Simon effect compared to monolinguals, but there was no significant difference between groups for global effects. Conclusions: Results suggest a bilingual disadvantage on tasks that require any mode of language processing.

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