Prediction ability in bilingual individuals: An eye tracking study with younger and older adults

Abstract

Studies with monolingual speakers show that people predict upcoming linguistic elements during sentence processing. Linguistic prediction behavior has been found to be less consistent in studies with bilingual individuals performing in their non-native language and in neurotypical older monolingual adults. The present study utilized an eye-tracking paradigm to investigate whether bilingual younger and older neurotypical individuals predict upcoming nouns in sentences that include constraining verbs, and if they do so both in their first language (L1) and in their second language (L2). Data was analyzed from 44 Norwegian-English proficient bilingual adults (27 younger and 17 older adults) who completed the eye-tracking experiment in each of the two languages, as well as cognitive and linguistic tests. The results demonstrated similar prediction abilities in L1 and L2 for both the younger and older participants. Older adults were slower than younger adults, although they did look to the target images only at the end of the predictive window. Participants' working memory span, language proficiency, and the cognate status of the stimuli did not explain prediction performance. The study adds to the relatively sparse existing data on prediction abilities in bilingual people and in older individuals.