South-East European Research Centre (SEERC)

Mastering two languages has been associated with enhancement in human executive control, but some previous studies have failed to replicate such advantage, relying exclusively on comparisons between bilingual and monolingual individuals. The present study will seek to explore the fundamental question of whether the bilingual advantages in executive functioning are restricted to very specific and undetermined circumstances such as using specific language pairs that are different or similar to one another. The study aims to critically disentangle competing views between cognitive theories and neuroscientific studies in relation to the effect of language pairs in cognitive advantage. The study compares two different bilingual groups in terms of their language pair distance in executive control tasks