Minna Lehtonen
University of Turku

Minna Lehtonen

University of Turku
Finland

Multilingualism and cognition

Command of two or more languages can have many communicative benefits for an individual, but the question of whether bilingualism can also have beneficial effects on cognition and the brain has been debated in recent years.

The management of two languages in one mind is assumed to engage so-called domain-general executive functions that are important in controlling and regulating our behaviour. This putative cognitive advantage in bilinguals has thus been assumed to be due to the massive training of executive functions that bilinguals have accumulated due to their long experience in suppressing interference from the competing language or in frequent language switching.

In this talk, I will review the current evidence from behavioural tasks and brain-level studies and present ways, both methodological and theory-driven, in which the field could move forward.