Research suggests that heterogeneous life experiences (e.g. multilingualism) might facilitate the development of mental flexibility. The current paper presents the conceptual replication of a study originally presented by Greve and colleagues [Greve, W., Koch, M., Rasche, V., and Kersten, K. (2021). Extending the Scope of the 'Cognitive Advantage'…

This study explored the impacts of translingual practices on English as an additional language (EAL) writing education in a non-English as a medium of instruction (non-EMI) context at a Chinese university. The findings highlighted the benefits of translingual practices in enhancing students' comprehension, easing cognitive challenges, and…

Although a bilingual advantage has been reported for various measures of cognitive control, most previous studies have looked at a limited range of cognitive control measures. Furthermore, they typically leave unaddressed whether positive effects of bilingualism hold for all bilinguals or whether these are modulated by differences in bilingual…

Proficient bilinguals use two languages actively, but the contexts in which they do so may differ dramatically. The present study asked what consequences the contexts of language use hold for the way in which cognitive resources modulate language abilities. Three groups of speakers were compared, all of whom were highly proficient Spanish-English…

Recent studies reported reductions of well-established biases in decision making under risk, such as the framing effect, during foreign language (FL) use. These modulations were attributed to the use of FL itself, which putatively entails an increase in emotional distance. A reduced framing effect in this setting, however, might also result from…

Bilinguals sometimes outperform age-matched monolinguals on non-language tasks involving cognitive control. But the bilingual advantage is not consistently found in every experiment and may reflect specific attributes of the bilinguals tested. The goal of this dissertation was to determine if the way in which bilinguals use language, specifically…