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Updated: Oct 28, 2025

Examining Bilingual Language Control Using the Stroop Task
Published on: February 26, 2020
Evidence for cognitive and brain reserve supporting executive control of memory in lifelong bilinguals
Alessandra Macbeth1, Eve Higby2, Natsuki Atagi3
1Department of Psychology, Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, CA, 91702, USA; Department of Psychology, University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA, 92521, USA.
Abstract:
Recent bilingualism research attempts to understand whether continually controlling multiple languages provides domain-general benefits to other aspects of cognition. Yet little attention has been given to whether this extends to resistance to proactive interference (PI), which involves the filtering of irrelevant memory traces in order to focus attention on relevant to-be-remembered information. The present study sought to determine whether bilingualism provides benefits to resistance to PI performance and brain structure in regions supporting executive control of memory. Eighty-two younger and older adult participants, half English monolinguals and half highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals, completed directed forgetting and release from PI tasks and underwent an MRI scan that measured cortical volume, thickness, and white matter integrity. While behavioral performance between bilinguals and monolinguals did not differ, bilinguals displayed thinner cortex in brain regions related to resistance to PI, providing evidence for cognitive reserve, and showed positive relationships between white matter integrity and resistance to PI performance, indicative of brain reserve. This study is the first to demonstrate cognitive reserve and brain reserve in different brain structure indices within the same healthy participants and suggests that bilingualism supports important structural relationships between regions necessary for executive control of memory.
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