Stroop task response times: The bilingual advantage

Bilingual individuals often must focus on one language while suppressing interference of another language and may therefore develop a specialized capacity to selectively attend to the language currently being used, a form of cognitive control. For this investigation, monolingual and bilingual individuals completed a 40-item modified Stroop task. In this task, participants were shown incongruent visual stimuli, with the names of various colors presented in a different ink color. Participants were instructed to respond verbally by naming the ink color instead of reading the written color word. Investigators scored verbal responses for accuracy and measured speed of response. Additionally, investigators measured duration of selected responses. Results demonstrate that monolingual and bilingual individuals were similarly accurate on the task. However, on average, bilingual speakers were faster at responding than monolingual speakers. Further, bilingual speakers were less variable in response time with responses that were shorter in duration than monolingual speakers. These results are discussed with reference to theories of differential brain development and cognitive function in individuals who simultaneously acquire more than one language.