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Updated: Aug 6, 2026

Examining Bilingual Language Control Using the Stroop Task
Published on: February 26, 2020
Sociolinguistic Context Constrains Bilingual Advantages in Metacognition
Leona Polyanskaya1,2, Mikhail Ordin2,3
1Centro de Investigación Micaela Portilla, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain.
None:
Previous studies have reported enhanced metacognitive efficiency in bilinguals, particularly when both languages are institutionally supported and used across educational and public domains. Whether this advantage extends to heritage-language bilingualism remains unclear. We tested local and global metacognition in German monolinguals, German-Turkish bilinguals, and German-Slavic bilinguals using three language-learning tasks targeting semantic inference, statistical learning, and artificial grammar learning. Contrary to predictions based on bilingual advantage and typological-distance accounts, heritage bilinguals did not show enhanced local metacognitive efficiency. German-Turkish bilinguals showed lower local metacognitive efficiency than monolinguals and German-Slavic bilinguals across tasks, and German-Slavic bilinguals showed no consistent advantage over monolinguals. By contrast, group-level measures suggested stronger global metacognitive calibration in bilingual participants. These findings indicate that bilingualism does not uniformly enhance metacognition and that sociolinguistic factors, including language status, educational use, and domain breadth of language use, may constrain or override effects of typological distance. The results distinguish local confidence monitoring from broader self-performance evaluation and identify heritage-language bilingualism as an important boundary condition for claims about bilingual metacognitive advantage.
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