Extending the cognitive advantage hypothesis: a conceptual replication study of the relationship between multilingualism and flexible goal adjustment

Research suggests that heterogeneous life experiences (e.g. multilingualism) might facilitate the development of mental flexibility. The current paper presents the conceptual replication of a study originally presented by Greve and colleagues [Greve, W., Koch, M., Rasche, V., and Kersten, K. (2021). Extending the Scope of the 'Cognitive Advantage' Hypothesis: Multilingual Individuals Show Higher Flexibility of Goal Adjustment. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1-17. ], which found a positive predictive relation of multilingualism and mental flexibility using flexible goal adjustment (FGA). The current study extends the previous design in that it is longitudinal and includes participants from a different population and a bigger sample with data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS, [Blossfeld, H.-P., Rossbach, H.-G., & Maurice, J. von (2011). Education as a Lifelong Process: The German National Educational Panel Study]). Regression analyses in this sample of German high school students (N = 4335) revealed that different indicators of multilingual use of languages (grade 9) significantly predict FGA in grade 10. FGA is an example for an ability based on broad mental flexibility. This is first evidence from a large longitudinal data set that shows that multilingual contexts could be a stimulating developmental condition for flexibility-based abilities.