This study investigated whether early especially efficient utilization of executive functioning in young bilinguals would transcend potential cultural benefits. To dissociate potential cultural effects from bilingualism, four-year-old U.S. Korean–English bilingual children were compared to three monolingual groups – English and Korean monolinguals in the U.S.A. and another Korean monolingual group, in Korea. Overall, bilinguals were most accurate and fastest among all groups. The bilingual advantage was stronger than that of culture in the speed of attention processing, inverse processing efficiency independent of possible speed-accuracy trade-offs, and the network of executive control for conflict resolution. A culture advantage favoring Korean monolinguals from Korea was found in accuracy but at the cost of longer response times.

This study examined the effects of positive affect on working memory (WM) and short-term memory (STM). Given that WM involves both storage and controlled processing and that STM primarily involves storage processing, we hypothesised that if positive affect facilitates controlled processing, it should improve WM more than STM. The results demonstrated that positive affect, compared with neutral affect, significantly enhanced WM, as measured by the operation span task. The influence of positive affect on STM, however, was weaker. These results suggest that positive affect enhances WM, a task that involves controlled processing, not just storage processing. Additional analyses of recall and processing times and accuracy further suggest that improved WM under positive affect is not attributable to motivational differences, but results instead from improved controlled cognitive processing.

Despite a growing number of studies on bilingual advantages in executive functions (EF), their findings have been inconsistent. To shed light on this issue, we aimed to address both the conceptual and methodological limitations that have prevailed in the literature: failure to consider diverse bilingual experiences when assessing bilingual advantages or to address the task impurity problems that can arise with EF tasks. Drawing on the adaptive control hypothesis and control process model of code-switching, we adopted theory-driven and latent variable approaches to examine the relations between bilingual interactional contexts and EF. By administering 9 EF tasks to 175 bilingual participants over multiple sessions, we found that bilinguals' dual-language context significantly predicted the latent variable of task-switching, while a dense code-switching context significantly predicted 2 latent variables of inhibitory control and goal maintenance. These findings remained robust after controlling for potential confounds of demographics, socioeconomic status, nonverbal intelligence, and unintended language-switching tendency. Our study suggests that bilingual interactional context is a key language experience that modulates bilingual advantages in EF. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).