Psychology (Functional Area: Developmental & Cognitive Processes)
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Browsing Psychology (Functional Area: Developmental & Cognitive Processes) by Subject "Bilingualism"
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Item Open Access Exploring the Bilingual Advantage in Executive Control: Using Goal Maintenance and Expectancies(2016-09-20) Viswanathan, Mythili; Bialystok, Ellen B.Previous research has shown that bilingualism helps to offset age-related losses in certain executive processes such as inhibitory control, task switching and divided attention. The two studies presented in this dissertation investigated possible mechanisms underlying this bilingual advantage in executive control by examining the role of expectancies and goal maintenance in monolingual and bilingual younger (30 to 40 years) and older adults (60 to 80 years). In Chapter 2, the fadeout paradigm (Mayr & Liebscher, 2001) was used to examine differences in the ability to disengage from an irrelevant task cue. Testing began with single task blocks of shape and colour classifications presented separately, followed by a task switching block in which the two tasks alternated randomly. On trial 49, one of the tasks became irrelevant, leaving only a single task to perform. The critical variable was the point at which participants performance reflected this change by examining the number of trials required to return to single task block speed. Results showed that both younger and older bilinguals returned to single task block speeds sooner than monolinguals. The results were interpreted as showing that bilinguals were better able to use task cues to improve task performance and that outsourcing control to task cues may be beneficial. In Chapter 3, a dual modality classification paradigm was used to determine the speed at which two tasks could be executed at the same time as a means of measuring the ability to sustain task goals. The task required participants to simultaneously respond manually to visual stimuli and verbally to auditory stimuli. Results revealed that younger and older bilinguals showed smaller costs in responding to two tasks whereas monolinguals experienced larger delays in making their responses. Proportion analysis of dual task costs and pairs of responses revealed a bilingual advantage and did not show any age-related increases in costs. The results were interpreted as demonstrating the strength in goal maintenance in bilinguals, allowing them to establish a task goal, control interference from stimulus pairings in order to uphold the goal, and to manage multiple streams of information, and these abilities are sustained in aging.Item Open Access Resolving Between-Language and Within-Language Competition in Bilinguals(2014-07-09) Chung-Fat-Yim, Ashley Kim; Bialystok, Ellen BFriesen et al. (2011) reported behavioural and electrophysiological differences in how monolinguals and bilinguals resolved lexical competition in a picture selection task (PST). Participants selected a named picture from two alternatives that were related semantically, phonologically, or unrelated. Both groups were slower on related pairs, but the additional RT cost on semantically-related pairs was smaller for bilinguals than for monolinguals. Importantly, monolinguals exhibited attenuated N400s for semantically-related pairs while bilinguals did not. The current study pursued these results with a homogeneous group of English-French bilinguals performing the task in both languages. Measures of executive control, language proficiency, and language production abilities were acquired to investigate their influence in resolving interlingual and intralingual competition. In both languages, semantic pairs generated longer RTs than phonological and unrelated pairs and as in the earlier study, there was no modulation of the N400. There was no evidence for a relation between the PST and the flanker task. However, a relation was found between vocabulary knowledge and the PST in the weaker language.