MENTAL ARITHMETIC - A COMPONENTIAL ANALYSIS OF SPEED-OF-PROCESSING ACROSS MONOLINGUAL, WEAK BILINGUAL, AND STRONG BILINGUAL ADULTS

Two experiments compared rates of solving simple and complex addition and multiplication problems in groups of speakers of French or English in Experiment 1 (n = 35) and Spanish or English in Experiment 2 (n = 84). Subjects were divided into groups of English unilinguals, weak bi linguals, and strong bilinguals according to their performance on a na ming task. In both experiments, simple problems consisted of two singl e-digit numbers. At least three single-digit numbers were used for com plex problems in Experiment 1 and double-digit numbers in Experiment 2 . Mean solution times, particularly for complex problems, were lowest for the monolingual group, followed in turn by the weak bilingual and strong bilingual groups, but these differences were not statistically reliable in either experiment. In Experiment 2, however, componential analyses of solution times indicated that strong bilingual subjects we re slower at executing the carry operation when solving complex proble ms,