Linguistic term paper

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Bilingualism in Cognition 1. Cognitive effects of bilingualism 1.1 Positive effects a) Higher verbal and nonverbal IQ compared to monolinguals matched for age, socio-economic status, and language attitudes (Adesope et al. 2010; Bialystok 1999, 2001, 2005; Peal & Lambert 1962, a.o.) b) Better “Executive Function”, i.e. set of processes for planning, monitoring, and regulating yourself (Bialystok, 2001; Bialystok et al. 2006; Bialystok & Feng, 2009). c) advantages for metalinguistic abilities and literacy (Adesope et al. 2010; Bialystok et al. 2003; Campbell & Sais, 1995 a.o.).

• Bilinguals: earlier awareness of words as arbitrary symbols → enhancement of symbolic thinking and representation abilities

• Bilinguals more aware about the syntactic rules • Bilinguals better at correcting ungrammatical sentences • Greater awareness of individual sounds = strong predictor of later reading success

d) easily learning an L3 later in life compared to monolinguals learning an L2 later in life, even when the languages are unrelated (e.g. Basque, Spanish, English. Cummins 1979; Sanz 2000; Thomas 1988; Zobl 1993, a.o.) e) Health: protection against mental syndromes and diseases in aging

• Dementia: bilingual adults with dementia began to show symptoms on average 4 years later than monolingual adults with dementia (Bialystok et al. 2007)

• Alzheimer’s disease: 5.1-year delay in the onset of Alzheimer’s disease for bilinguals relative to monolinguals (Craik et al. 2010) due to ‘exercise’ of attentional control of bilinguals that contributes to the delay in onset

f) Increased density of gray matter than monolinguals (Mechelli et al. 2004)

• directly proportional to both proficiency (more proficiency more density) and age of acquisition (lower Age of Acquisition → more density)

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(1)

1.2 Disadvantages a) Bilinguals typically have smaller vocabularies than monolinguals (in each language. Mahon & Crutchley, 2006)

§ Challenges in measuring this? § Do you believe bilingual children/adults have fewer concepts with word labels than

monolinguals?

b) Bilingual adults: slower to access vocabulary words

§ due to less “practice” using each language § more attentional focus to suppress/inhibit the language: might interfere with word

retrieval

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2. Bilingual competence and Executive Function/Executive Control à Executive functions: neuronal processes involved in planning, organizing, monitoring, and

regulating one’s actions in order to achieve a goal § Inhibition and impulse control § Cognitive flexibility (shifting / switching mental tasks) § Updating information in working memory

à Why is Executive Function important?

• Strong Executive Function helps develop important life skills: - problem solving (including solving interpersonal / relational problems) - doing well in taska in school/at work - making successful decisions

• Efficient Executive Function correlates with better math, language skills (including literacy) and science learning in children (Blair & Razza 2007; St. Clair-Thompson & Gathercole 2006)

“Between the ages of 7 and 14 years, children who score poorly on working memory measures linked with executive skills typically perform below expected standards in national curriculum assessments of English, mathematics, and science…”

(St. Clair Thompson & Gathercole 2006)

2.1. How do we measure Executive Function? à Dimensional Change Card Sort Task

- Children required to sort a series of bivalent test cards, first according to one dimension (e.g. color) and then according to the other (e.g. shape) - Most 3-year-olds perseverate during the post-switch phase, exhibiting a pattern of inflexibility (similar to that seen in patients with prefrontal cortical damage, or older children with disorders such as attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism) - By 5 years of age, most children switch when instructed to do so (2)

You can watch a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L7xzcvJzZc

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à Stroop Task - participants required to say the color of the ink of the word, not what the word says Congruent Condition: RED GREEN BLUE

Noncongruent Condition: GREEN BLUE RED

- words have a strong influence over your ability to say the color - problem for your brain: interference between the different nature of information [run experiment at home! https://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/java/ready.html ] à Simon Task - subjects are shown a shape, color, letter, or word on either the left or the right side of the display - Subjects told to press either a left key or a right key based on the identity of the stimulus (e.g. what shape it is) - location of the stimulus is irrelevant to the task, but it can be either consistent with the location of the response (e.g. a shape requiring a right key press appearing on the right side of the screen) or inconsistent with it (e.g. a shape requiring a right key press appearing on the left side of the screen). - Responses faster and more accurate for consistent than for inconsistent trials (3)

[run experiment at home! https://www.psytoolkit.org/experiment- library/experiment_simon.html]

¨ Bilinguals significantly better/faster after the shift/in the noncongruent condition compared to monolinguals

2.2 When do we start to see these cognitive positive effects? § Kovacs & Mehler (2009)

- Subjects:

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- 20 monolingual 0;7 - 20 bilingual 0;7

- Procedure: - Switch task - Pre-switch: 9 tri-syllabic made-up words followed by visual “reward” (looming puppet), which consistently appeared on the same side of the screen - Post-switch: 9 different tri-syllabic made-up words followed by a visual reward on the opposite side of the screen - Anticipatory look = Looks within 1s after the speech cue and before the appearance of the reward (4)

- Results - Both groups increased their correct anticipatory looks alike during the trials of the pre-switch phase. - Only bilinguals displayed an increase in correct anticipatory looks during the post switch phase. - Monolinguals: difficulty in overcoming a well-learned response - fits well with previous results showing that 7-month-old infants display perseveration and difficulty inhibiting previously rewarded responses due to their immature Executive Function (5)

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à Experiment 2: What if the switch is signaled by a different cue?

- AAB (initial repeated syllables) in pre-switch phase and ABB (final repeated syllables) in post-switch phase

- Same results! only bilinguals learn the new response in the post-switch phase

à Experiment 3: Executive Function enhancement in bilinguals restricted to language acquisition, i.e. the auditory modality?

- They used a sequence of 3 visual figures - Same results! only bilinguals learn the new response in the post-switch phase 2.3 How does being bilingual exercise inhibition? • Task of translating a visually presented word:kind of Stroop task - Bilinguals have to avoid naming the printed word and, instead, produce a translation equivalent as a response. - in naming a picture, bilinguals have the problem of selecting between alternative responses, and may need to suppress the dominant language in favor of LB • bilinguals better at Executive Control (tasks): constantly in a state of having to inhibit one of their languages • have to be able to focus on the language they are using, and sometimes they have to be able to switch between their languages “[B]ilingual children performed better than the other […] groups on precisely the tasks that presented conflict for competing options that needed to be resolved for a correct response. This parallels the situation in which two competing language systems create a conflict for selection in bilingual speech production” (Bialystok 2009)

§ how do we know whether the control mechanism that bilinguals use has to do with inhibition of language B, instead of pre-selection of language A?

§ consensus in empirical evidence if individuals must switch between one language and another

§ in a production task, such as a digit naming or picture naming, reaction time cost in switching from one language to another

§ takes longer to switch from the non-dominant language to the dominant language, than from the dominant language to the non-dominant language

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à Meuter & Allport (1999) - Subjects: - 16 bilinguals (23-44yo) - English L1 or L2 / French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish as L1/dominant languiage or L2/non-dominant language - All proficient in the two languages - Procedure: - Establishing a baseline: Numeral-naming task I: Participants were asked to read aloud, as fast as possible, lists of 20 numerals in each of their two languages. Mean reading time in L2 was on average 20% slower than on the L1 - Numeral-naming task II: Participants asked to read aloud, as fast as possible, single digit numbers, presented one at a time - Numbers appeared in a blue or yellow rectangle. The color of the rectangle told the participant the language in which he or she had to name the numeral. E.g. Blue = English, Yellow = French - From one trial to another, there was a 1/3 chances of the color changing. - Switch trials could be L1 → L2 or L2 → L1 - Results: - First, for each language, switch trials were slower than non-switch trials - On non-switch trials mean Response Time was faster in L1 than in L2 - On switch trials, mean Response Time was consistently slower in L1 than in L2; i.e. language-switching cost was consistently larger when switching to the dominant L1 from the weaker L2 than vice versa

¨ Discussion: § “paradoxical” asymmetry in the cost of switching languages: differences in relative

strength of the bilingual’s two languages

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§ Naming in the non-dominant language/L2 requires active inhibition or suppression of the stronger competitor language/L1; the inhibition persists into the following (switch) trial in the form of “negative priming” of the L1 lexicon as a whole

§ asymmetry observed between L1 and L2 is also observed between L1 and L3 and L2 and L3 (Philipp et al. 2007)

§ lexical representations in the more dominant language/L1 must be actively suppressed in order to produce words in the non-dominant language (e.g., Green, 1998) - predicts that any asymmetry should disappear as proficiency and use of the two languages becomes more balanced. This is the case (Costa & Santesteban 2004)

¨ But how do we know that non-dominant language is still activated, instead of “dormant”?

§ Marian, Spivey & Hirsch (2003) - Subjects:

- 55 Russian-English bilinguals (born in USSR, moved to US during early teens) - All proficient in the two languages. - Procedure: - Eye-tracking experiment: they were shown 4 objects on a display, e.g. a marker, a stamp, a balloon, and a potato. (6)

- Instructions: (i) Look at the center cross; (ii) pick up target object; (iii) and (iv) are filler instructions to pick up distractor objects - 20 trials in English and 20 in Russian in Exp 1 and 2 - 40 in English or 40 in Russian in Exp 3 - Target objects had phonetic competitors - Competitors shared the first two phonemes - Concrete nouns, approximately same frequency - Experiment 1: Between-language competition, e.g. marker - marku (stamp); car - karta (map) - Experiment 2: Between- and within-language competition - 10 control items with no present competitors - 10 between-language

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- 10 within-language competitor (e.g. marker - marble; karta (map) - kartoshka (stamp)) - 10 between- and within-language competitors; e.g. car - karta (map) - kartoshka (potato) - Experiment 3: Same as Exp 2 but between-subject design (tested in English OR Russian) - Results: - In all 3 experiments, participants made significantly more eye-movements to the between-language competitor than to a non-overlapping control object - In Experiments 2 and 3 they also found subjects looked at the within language competitors more than at the filler. - In Experiment 3 they found: - No effect of type of competition → competition was equally strong within and between languages - No effect of language → competition was present for both native Russian and non dominant English - Discussion: - early stages of language processing (real-time mapping of acoustic-phonetic input to lexical items) in bilinguals takes place in parallel for the two languages, even in a purely monolingual environment (Experiment 3) - However, the two languages may be using separate structures at later stages of processing (such as lexical processing). Suggested (*) and assigned (**) readings ** Blanco-Elorrieta, Esti, Emmoreyc, Karen and Liina Pylkkänen, 2018. Language switching decomposed through MEG and evidence from bimodal bilinguals. PNAS 115, 39, 9708-9713. * Marian, Viorica, Spivey, Michael and Joy Hirsch, 2003. Shared and separate systems in bilingual language processing: Converging evidence from eyetracking and brain imaging. Brain and Language 86,1, 70-82.