Objective: This article provides a review of studies that have investigated the ambiguity resolution of bilingual comprehenders. It specifically examines whether bilingualism confers an advantage in resolving ambiguous sentences when compared to monolingualism.
Method: To conduct this review, peer-reviewed empirical studies on ambiguity resolution in bilingual and monolingual comprehenders were systematically examined. Relevant articles were identified through searches in academic databases (e.g., Scopus, Web of Science, PsycINFO) using keywords such as bilingual ambiguity resolution, sentence processing, and conflict tasks.
Results: The review findings indicate that bilinguals may show advantages in some ambiguity-resolution contexts; however, their performance is influenced by factors such as cross-language co-activation, language proficiency, and structural differences between languages. Evidence from linguistic ambiguity tasks does not consistently support a bilingual advantage, whereas findings from non-linguistic conflict tasks remain mixed. These inconsistencies appear to stem largely from methodological differences across studies.
Discussions: We suggest that, to examine ambiguity resolution in bilinguals and monolinguals, performance on linguistic and non-linguistic ambiguity resolution tasks needs to be differentiated; only highly proficient bilinguals might be able to resolve ambiguity in their L2 in the same way monolingual speakers do in their first language.