Native Multilingualism and Stroop Effect : a Pilot Study Examining the Relationships Between the Two Variables

Multiple studies point out a positive relationship between bilingualism (multilingualism), cognitive development of children and their academic performance at the early age. The Stroop Test is often used as one of the methods of assessing subjects’ executive function of inhibition (the ability to suppress dominant responses), which appears to be enhanced in bilingual/multilingual individuals compared to their monolingual counterparts. The better executive control in bilinguals/multilinguals that the function of inhibition represents only a part of (besides shifting, i.e. the ability to switch over between tasks, and monitoring, i.e. the ability to update information in the working memory) is believed to stem from these individuals switching over between their languages as well as their need to suppress the other language-related information irrelevant in the given language context.This paper describes a pilot experiment preceding a study of a larger scale whose main objective is to obtain data to be used to assess a possible relationship between the number of mother tongues Swedish university students have a command of and their performance at the Stroop Test