Bilingualism, executive function, and beyond: Questions and insights

The papers in this volume continue the quest to investigate the moderating factors and understand the mechanisms underlying effects (or lack thereof) of bilingualism on cognition in children, adults, and the elderly. They grew out of a 2015 workshop organized by two of us (Irina Sekerina and Virginia Valian) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, funded by NSF’s Developmental and Learning Sciences and Linguistics Programs (grant #1451631). The workshop’s goal was to bring together researchers whose fields did not always overlap and who could learn from each other’s insights. In attendance were linguists working on bilingualism, cognitive psychologists interested in executive function and working memory, and medical researchers studying executive function in the laboratory and in the field. Until our workshop, the conditions and factors instrumental to connecting bilingualism and executive function were primarily explored from within bilingualism, with less direct input from cognitive psychologists, linguists, and researchers on aging. Thus, our goal was to bring together experts from different disciplines – who rarely had the opportunity to interact at the same scientific venues – and facilitate inderdisciplinary conversation that could bridge the gaps between the fields