Conflict resolution in sentence processing is the same for bilinguals and monolinguals: The role of confirmation bias in testing for bilingual advantages

• We examined the time-course of a homograph-interference effect.
• Both groups were equally adept at suppressing the context-inappropriate meaning.
• We tested if bilingual advantages in inhibitory control was task specific.
• The critical interactions were not significant.

The primary purpose of this study was to test for bilingual advantages in conflict resolution during sentence processing. Experiment 1 examined the time-course of a homograph-interference effect when test words were either presented immediately after the sentence-final word or after a delay. Bilinguals and monolinguals were equally adept at using the extra time to suppress the context-inappropriate meaning when the sentence-final word was a homograph. Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that bilingual advantages in inhibitory control enable bilinguals to close the performance gap in a sentence grammaticality task compared to a sentence acceptability task. The critical group by task interactions were not significant across four different behavioral measures. Recent studies offering opposing conclusions were examined for the influence of confirmation bias.