One approach to resolving the controversy over whether bilingualism affects executive function (EF) performance has been to identify the specific tasks and populations that might show these effects. The assumption is that the effect of bilingualism reliably occurs with some tasks and populations but not others and that identifying those conditions will settle outstanding contradictions. However, it is now clear that experiments using the same task (e.g., flanker, Simon, etc.) and apparently the same populations (monolingual or bilingual participants) still lead to different outcomes. Therefore, something in addition to these factors must determine performance. The present study tested the hypothesis that changes in demands for attentional control within a task is associated with performance differences for groups with different attentional resources, in this case, monolingual and bilingual participants. Sixty-four young adults who were classified as monolingual or bilingual based on a detailed questionnaire completed four increasingly difficult conditions of an n-back task while EEG was recorded. Behavioral results showed greater declines with increasing difficulty for monolinguals than bilinguals, and electrophysiological results revealed more effortful processing by monolinguals across all conditions. Our interpretation is that demands for attentional control by the task in conjunction with assessments of attentional resources in individuals or groups determines performance on executive function tasks. These results lead to a re-examination of how executive function is conceptualized and the role of bilingualism in performance on these tasks.

解决有关双语是否会影响执行功能（EF）表现的争议的一种方法是，确定可能显示出这些影响的特定任务和人群。假设双语的影响确实会在某些任务和人群中发生，而在其他任务和人群中则不会，并且确定这些条件将解决突出的矛盾。但是，现在很清楚，使用相同任务（例如，侧翼，西蒙等）并且显然使用相同人群（单语或双语参与者）进行的实验仍会导致不同的结果。因此，除了这些因素外，还必须确定性能。本研究检验了一个假设，即任务中对注意力控制的需求的变化与具有不同注意力资源的小组（在这种情况下为单语和双语参与者）的表现差异有关。根据详细的调查表将64名年轻人分为单语或双语，在记录脑电图的同时，他们完成了四个越来越困难的正背任务。行为结果显示，与双语者相比，单语者的下降幅度更大，难度增加，而电生理结果表明，在所有情况下，单语者都会更加努力地进行处理。我们的解释是，任务对注意力控制的要求与对个人或团队中注意力资源的评估相结合，决定了执行功能任务的绩效。这些结果导致对行政职能如何概念化以及双语在执行这些任务中的作用的重新审视。