Attentional resources, bilingualism and social presence : An integrated view of executive attention.

One of the most highly debated issues in psycholinguistics during the last decades is the so-called bilingual cognitive advantage (BICA), i.e. the hypothesis that people with a bilingual experience outperform monolingual speakers on cognitive tasks, presumably attributed to strengthened executive functions. This debate is nowadays deadlocked, as contradictory findings continue to accumulate. Unfortunately, despite attempts to find explanations in the diversity of bilingual experiences as a potential source of individual variability and the questioning of the reliability of executive function tests used to measure BICA, the status quo is maintained and new research perspectives are strongly needed, possibly outside the realm of psycholinguistics. We consider bilingual experience as deeply anchored in social context and argue that any conclusion drawn from traditional paradigms assessing cognition in socially isolated subjects would be hazardous. In an era of increasing influence of concepts such as the social brain, studies of bilingualism have seldom taken into account the social nature of human interaction via language. Recent studies, however, suggest that even minimal components of social context, such as mere presence of others, with no overt interaction or communication, modulate BICA in a complex and dynamic manner, in interaction with other factors including linguistic context and gender. We will focus on attention as a common mechanism that accounts for both bilingual language processing and the monitoring of social presence. Bringing together psycholinguistics and social psychology perspectives, this review calls for a move towards a socially embedded approach of bilingualism, with an integrated view of executive attention.