Selective Attention in Cognitive Processing Revisited: A Long-term Re-evaluation

The volume by Harris (1992) was published at a time when research on the cognitive effects of bilingualism was in its infancy. In this article I revisit the chapter I contributed to that volume and evaluate the extent to which the arguments presented there remain valid. Specifically, I review three claims I made, namely, that the effects of bilingual experience extend into nonverbal domains, that these effects were continuous in nature and not categorical, and that selective attention was the key to explaining cognitive change in bilinguals. Thirty years later, these claims remain largely intact. In contrast, the claim that the mechanism for the effects comes from a specific aspect of linguistic processing that transfers to other domains must be rejected.