Conflict Monitoring

In a bilingual context, Costa, Hernández, Costa-Faidella and Sebastián-Gallés (2009) say that a continuous monitoring of which language to use for each communication is active. It called conflict monitoring, the ability to detect information conflict and then increase cognitive control to solve the problem. Some researchers think that instead of inhibition, conflict monitoring will give a bilingual advantage, although, monitoring involves inhibiting irrelevant information and stimuli and promoting goal-relevant information (Costa, Hernández, Costa-Faidella & Sebastián-Gallés, 2009).

Some concluded that bilingualism provided enhanced mental flexibility and numerous varied mental abilities because they acquire more experiences in code-switching

Bialystok and Viswanathan (2009) examined 8 years old bilingual children in India, comparing them with different groups: Canadian bilinguals (English and another language), Canadian English monolinguals and English-Indian bilinguals. Results showed that both bilingual groups performed better in terms of inhibition and flexibility than monolinguals, thus it could be concluded that the occurrence of cognitive benefits is unrelated to culture. Similarly, Yang, Yang and Lust (2011) compared 4 years old English-Korean bilingual children with Korean and English monolinguals in America and Korean monolinguals in Korea and they also discovered the cognitive advantages of bilingual children. This means that typological distance, cultural background and language of instruction did not influence EF performance (Barac, Bialystok, Castro & Sanchez, 2014). Adi-Japha, Berberich-Artzi and Libnawi (2010) compared monolingual and bilingual children in a nursery school, asking them to draw, for example, a flower that did not exist in reality. Monolingual children solved the problem with not drawing one component of the flower (e.g.: petals), while bilingual children drew more abstract flowers (e.g.: flower with a face or teeth). Adi-Japha

In the literature the advantages have been demonstrated using tasks, which measures children’s EF, like the Simon task (Poarch & van Hell, 2012; Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008), Dimensional Change Card Sort task (Bialystok & Martin, 2004; Bialystok, 1999), Stroop task (Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008), Attentional Networks Task (Yang, Yang & Lust 2011; Costa, Hernández & Sebastián-Gallés, 2008), Flanker task (Bialystok & Barac, 2012), etc., therefore we also choose from these tasks to this