Did you know that if use two or more languages in your daily life, you will end up with having some cognitive benefits? Bilingual people demonstrate so-called "bilingual advantage" over monolinguals - they are faster in decision making, switching between different types of activities, are less prone to distractors, and many more. 

Since we have not one but two (or more) language systems in our brain, we need to constantly manage the languages to be able to speak in the correct language, e.g., suppress the irrelevant language and activate the relevant one. In other words, to be able to successfully communicate, we need to apply control processes towards our language systems. But as we are constantly controlling our languages, we are also getting better in controlling other, more general processes, hence the bilingual advantage.

Most of the studies that explore language control and domain-general control focus on bilinguals who speak English as a foreign language. However, in real life, we speak different languages - sometimes our foreign languages are close to our native one (for example, Polish and Ukrainian, or Belarusian and Russian), and sometimes our languages differ a lot (for example, Polish and Japanese). 

In my project, I am making an attempt to answer these questions: Does the amount of control that we need to apply to our languages in order to successfully use them depend on whether we speak close or distant languages? What is harder: speaking a language when it is close to your native one, or when it is distant? And do close-language-pair bilinguals show the same cognitive benefits as distant-language-pair bilinguals?