Impact of multilingualism on cardiac autonomic activity, working memory and trait anxiety: a pilot study

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in how multilingualism modifies executive functions. Heart rate variability (HRV), a noninvasive and innocuous indicator of cardiac autonomic function, can also capture individual differences that link cognitive performance with physiological and emotional profiles. This pilot study aimed to analyze the association of multilingualism with cognitive, autonomic, and emotional regulation during working memory (WM) tasks, while also considering trait anxiety (Trait-A). Nineteen young adults were classified as a monolingual group (MON, N = 9) or a multilingual group (MUL, N = 10). Participants completed the State‑Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and the Neuropsychological Battery of Executive Functions and Frontal Lobes (BANFE‑3). They then performed an N-back task at three difficulty levels while HRV linear and nonlinear indices were computed. MON exhibited high Trait‑A, whereas MUL showed moderate Trait‑A. No significant differences were observed in the BANFE-3 subtests, but MUL achieved greater accuracy at the 2-back level of the N-back task. HRV indices showed a load-dependent decline in both groups; within-group analyses, however, revealed that MON and MUL participants showed different within-group autonomic response patterns to cope with the rising cognitive load. These findings suggest that sustained multilingual experience may be associated with differences in autonomic-cognitive responses and attenuated anxiety-related disruptions, underscoring the value of HRV in characterizing individual variability in physiological and behavioral responses.