Bilingualism and False Hearing

Being bilingual is not only about speaking two languages, it is a quality that may lead to many advantages in terms of a person's cognition. Studies have shown that bilinguals present advantages in cognitive aspects such as creativity, problem-solving, and working memory tasks. Green (1998) proposed the Inhibitory Control Model (ICM) which states that when speaking a given language, bilinguals need to inhibit the other language they know but are not currently using. This model assumes that the same cognitive functions used to suppress the non-target language are the ones used to more broadly control attention and inhibition. Thus, it is possible that the reason why bilinguals present advantages on a cognitive level is because they are constantly exerting this inhibitory control process as they switch between languages which, in turn, reinforces their executive control abilities. The aim of the current study was to determine whether bilinguals outperform monolinguals in a language-based task that is related to inhibitory control: the false hearing task (Rogers, Jacoby, & Sommers, 2012). In the false hearing task, participants heard a clearly presented cue word followed by a target word presented in noise. The cue word could be related to the target (e.g., "ROW-BOAT"), related to a word that sounded like the target ("ROW-GOAT"), or totally unrelated to the target (e.g., "ROW-MASK") In order to hear the word that was actually said, listeners needed to inhibit the effect of the cue word. In the present study, the main focus was to examine bilingual vs monolingual performance on the false hearing task in order to assess bilinguals' presumed capacity of inhibiting irrelevant stimuli as predicted by the ICM. An online version of the false hearing experiment was devised in order to run the study.