Attending multiple languages: the relation between individual multilingual language use and attentional control

Abstract

Individuals speaking multiple language have been asserted to have a cognitive advantage, perhaps specifically in the domain of selective attention, although this claim has recently been challenged. The diversity of multilingual experiences and use seems of great importance here, and suggestions have been made that advantages especially emerge for individuals with higher ‘multilingual load’, referring to language experience and use factors including duration of multilingualism, number of languages mastered, and use of multiple languages in daily life. We captured multilingual language diversity using a language entropy measure, which encompasses several language use factors into one metric. We related individual differences in language entropy to selective attention as measured with an attentional blink (AB) task in 53 diverse multilingual individuals. During task performance, brain activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex was measured using fNIRS. We found no support for the claim that language diversity, or other individual factors related to language experience and use, influence AB magnitude. However, relations with T1 identification accuracy were observed and brain activity in the DLPFC during the attentional blink task also related to higher language diversity, jointly suggesting that language diversity may promote alertness and attention. This study is the first to relate simultaneous behavioral and brain attentional blink data to the language entropy measure.