COGNITIVE INHIBITION TESTED BY STROOP COLOUR WORD TASK IN EFL TEACHERS AS SUCCESSIVE BILINGUALS

Abstract

This paper is a partial replication study of the one done by Heidlmayr et al. (2014), and concerns the effect of second language use on inhibitory control/cognitive inhibition analysed by means of a Stroop Colour Word task in both L1 and L2, i.e. Serbian and English. Our aim was to test the starting hypothesis of the original research which states that the frequency of L2 use in successive bilinguals has an impact on their inhibitory control mechanism. The bilingual subjects asked to take part in the study by doing the bilingual version of the test are all EFL teachers at the Faculty of Philosophy in Nis. Their use of L2 is akin to that of bilinguals living in an L2 environment (such as those from the original research), in the sense that they communicate daily using L2 and cover a wide variety of topics with their students.  Our monolingual subjects, who served as control group, were randomly chosen from the same age group as bilinguals (older adults). They were asked to do only the L1 version of the test. The purpose of this small-scale research was to give a contribution to the ever-growing debate concerning the cognitive advantages of bilingualism.