Ellen Bialystok

Ellen Bialystok, OC, FRSC (born 1948) is a Canadian psychologist and professor. She carries the rank of Distinguished Research Professor at York University, in Toronto, where she is director of the Lifespan Cognition and Development Lab, and is also an associate scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1976 with a specialization in cognitive and language development in children.

Much of Bialystok's current research concentrates on bilingualism from childhood through older adulthood and aging, and its effects on cognitive processes over the lifespan. She has also studied aspects of language acquisition in children, both in written and verbal forms, and how bilingualism might affect these processes. Although her primary focus is bilingualism, she also examines the effect of musical training on the same elements of cognitive development and cognitive aging.

Bilingualism has been shown through various studies to have a significant effect on certain aspects of cognitive development, especially in comparison to that of monolingual individuals. Bialystok has investigated this idea further, attempting to figure out what parts of cognitive development, specifically, are affected by bilingualism. Children are of particular interest to this realm of research, as she studies the developmental progression of bilingual children as opposed to that of monolingual children.

While bilingualism has repeatedly been shown to affect cognitive development, research has been less focused on which aspects of cognitive development, in particular, are affected. Bialystok and Barac, in a study about the generality of bilingual effects on development, compared three groups of bilinguals to one group of monolinguals in a series of linguistic tasks and one nonlinguistic, executive control task involving task-switching. 

The three bilingual groups differed according to three factors: similarity between languages spoken, cultural background, and language of educational experience. All three bilingual groups outperformed the monolingual group on the task-switching executive control task, however, even in excluding the monolingual group, neither of the three differentiating factors had a significant effect on the performance of the executive control task. These results suggest that bilingualism itself provides an advantage in the nonverbal, executive control aspect of cognitive development.

Executive control is known to involve three main components including selective attention/inhibition, attention shifting, and working memory. In a separate study, Bialystok examined the difference in development and subsequent coordination of these three components of executive function in bilingual children as opposed to that of monolingual children. Two groups of children who were either monolingual or bilingual completed a complex classification task that required the use of either one or multiple components of executive control functions. 

This was done with the use of visual and/or auditory stimuli, where a single-modality version presented either the visual or auditory component, requiring the use of just one executive control component, and a dual-modality version that combined the two, and therefore required the use of multiple executive control components. The single-modality condition did not elicit significantly different performance by either the monolinguals or bilinguals, however, in the dual-modality condition that required the use of multiple components, bilinguals performed with much higher accuracy than the monolinguals.

Beyond this general advantage to cognitive development seen in bilinguals, there is remarkable evidence for an advantage regarding executive control in particular – specifically in cases where multiple components of this executive control is required for perform a task. This has implications for real-world situations, as multitasking is a common everyday function that bilinguals could possibly perform better at than monolinguals.