BILINGUALISM AND INHIBITORY CONTROL : The relationship between hours of speaking a second language and inhibition

Sammanfattning: In the globalized world of today the ability to speak more than one language, known asbilingualism, has become more common now than ever. There is research indicating thatlanguage processing accounts for the well debated „bilingual advantage‟ in inhibitory control.The process of speech production is supposed to make retrieved words more accessible forfuture retrieval through a consolidation process. When there is an association between thewords there will be a competition in retrieval during speech production; a competition that issolved by inhibitory control. The hypothesis tested in this study was that more hours ofspeaking second language (L2) could be associated with better performance on threeinhibition tests; the Flanker task, the Stroop task and the Simon task, when controlling for ageand fluid intelligence. The study contained 241 participants between 50-75 years old. Theresults were not in line with the hypothesis, except for one result that was significant in theopposite direction of the hypothesis; indicating that hours of speaking L2 was associated withworse performance on the Stroop test Alternative considerations concerning the results arepresented in the discussion. Keywords: Bilingualism, Inhibition, memory retrieval.