Doubling down on multifactorial approaches to the study of bilingualism &amp; executive control

Titone, Debra; Pivneva, Irina; Sheikh, Naveed; Webb, Nicole E.; Whitford, Veronica

doi:10.1017/s1366728914000595

Cited by 9 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Given that a number of studies have argued that L1 and L2 proficiency, age of L2 acquisition, language dominance, and L1 or L2 dominant linguistic environment that the bilinguals live in ought to be taken into account when studying bilinguals (van Hell and Poarch, 2014 ; Dong and Li, 2015 ; Mishra, 2015 ; Titone et al, 2015 ), the present study controls for age of acquisition, vocabulary knowledge, verbal fluency (see Perani et al, 2003 ), education, socioeconomic status, inhibition, intelligence, and processing speed, which is known to slow down with age (Salthouse, 1996 ) as well as verbal short-term memory and working memory, which are believed to play vital roles in discourse processing and comprehension (Hasher and Zacks, 1988 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comprehending Non-literal Language: Effects of Aging and Bilingualism

2018

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A pressing issue that the twenty-first century is facing in many parts of the developed world is a rapidly aging population. Whilst several studies have looked at aging older adults and their language use in terms of vocabulary, syntax and sentence comprehension, few have focused on the comprehension of non-literal language (i.e., pragmatic inference-making) by aging older adults, and even fewer, if any, have explored the effects of bilingualism on pragmatic inferences of non-literal language by aging older bilinguals. Thus, the present study examined the effects of age(ing) and the effects of bilingualism on aging older adults' ability to infer non-literal meaning. Four groups of participants made up of monolingual English-speaking and bilingual English-Tamil speaking young (17–23 years) and older (60–83 years) adults were tested with pragmatic tasks that included non-conventional indirect requests, conversational implicatures, conventional metaphors and novel metaphors for both accuracy and efficiency in terms of response times. While the study did not find any significant difference between monolinguals and bilinguals on pragmatic inferences, there was a significant effect of age on one type of non-literal language tested: conventional metaphors. The effect of age was present only for the monolinguals with aging older monolinguals performing less well than the young monolinguals. Aging older bilingual adults were not affected by age whilst processing conventional metaphors. This suggests a bilingual advantage in pragmatic inferences of conventional metaphors.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comprehending Non-literal Language: Effects of Aging and Bilingualism

2018

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“…This contribution focuses specifically on children, for whom the bilingual advantage appears even more difficult to pin down than for adults (see Valian, 2015 for a review). It explores alternative analytical methods that allow disentangling the effect of bilingual experience from other factors influencing EF (“thinking multifactorially from the outset”—Titone, Pivneva, Sheikh, Webb, & Whitford, 2015, p. 44), using a gradient, composite measure of bilingual experience.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying a Threshold for the Executive Function Advantage in Bilingual Children

Cat

Gusnanto

Serratrice

2017

Stud Second Lang Acquis

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The literature exploring the executive function correlates of bilingualism is vast, but to date, few studies have concentrated on children, for whom the bilingual advantage appears even more inconsistent than for adults. We investigate a highly heterogeneous group of children (in terms of bilingual experience and socio-economic status) and identify the critical threshold of bilingual experience from which an advantage can be observed at group level. The modeling methods adopted allow the use of fine-grained, continuous factors for age and socio-economic status, thereby effectively controlling for their effect and isolating the specific effect of bilingual experience. We pioneer the use of Cox Proportional Hazard regression to analyze performance in the Simon task. This allows the modeling of all data points without transformation nor outlier removal, and captures both accuracy and reaction time within the same analysis, while also being able to handle multiple predictor variables.

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“…Kroll also suggests that rather than looking narrowly at the relation between bilingualism and executive function, we should focus on how mono- and bilinguals process language. Titone, Pivneva, Sheikh, Webb and Whitford (2014) review work from their laboratory giving an example of how that could take place. Their work demonstrates that different executive function tasks are linked to different aspects of word processing in bilinguals.…”

Section: Executive Function and The Tasks That Measure Itmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bilingualism and cognition: A focus on mechanisms

Valian

2014

Bilingualism

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The goal of my keynote article, “Bilingualism and Cognition” (Valian, 2014), was to resolve the inconsistencies in effects of bilingualism on executive functions, whether the individuals were children, young adults, or old people. To summarize (and sharpen) my argument: 1.Especially in children and young adults, benefits of bilingualism for executive functions are not reliable. In old people, there are benefits for executive functions but contradictory results on delay of cognitive impairment, depending on whether studies are retrospective or prospective.2.All experiences that have benefits for executive functions and aging – and there are many – yield inconsistent effects. Bilingualism is not alone.3.Three reasons for inconsistencies in bilingualism and other experiences are: a.Executive function and cognitive reserve are broad cover terms for a variety of mechanisms, most of which are ill-understood. Because we mean different things by ‘executive function’ from one experiment to the next, we can both think we don't have an effect when we do and think we have an effect when we don’t.b.Tasks are impure: apparently similar tasks measure different aspects of executive function and measure other aspects of cognition as well. Because we lack a good analysis of tasks, we too often do not know what we are measuring. I encourage readers to examine the demos in the supplementary materials of the keynote article to see for themselves what the tasks are like.c.Individuals engage in many different activities that may be on a par with bilingualism in their benefits.4.Different types of bilingual experience are unlikely to explain the variability of findings, given the inconsistencies in extant data on varieties of bilingualism.5.There is a benefit of bilingualism, but bilingualism competes with other sources of benefits. Especially for children and young adults, whose daily lives are full of cognitively enriching and challenging experiences, we should expect variability in effects of being bilingual.6.The way forward is to focus on underlying mechanisms.

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Doubling down on multifactorial approaches to the study of bilingualism & executive control

Cited by 9 publications

References 9 publications

Comprehending Non-literal Language: Effects of Aging and Bilingualism

Comprehending Non-literal Language: Effects of Aging and Bilingualism

Identifying a Threshold for the Executive Function Advantage in Bilingual Children

Bilingualism and cognition: A focus on mechanisms

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