Doctoral Dissertation Research: Are bilinguals better learners? A neurocognitive investigation of the bilingual advantage

在国家科学基金会的支持下，Cari Bogulski女士将在Judith Kroll博士和Janet货车Hell博士的指导下为她的博士论文收集数据。目前的研究表明，在需要认知控制的任务中，双语者往往比单语者更容易掌握。过去的一些研究也发现了双语在词汇学习方面的优势。然而，这些双语的好处在很大程度上是相互关联的，很少有人知道语言使用映射到认知和学习的潜在机制。一种可能性是，双语的所有记录的好处反映了双语者在任何年龄都必须练习的不断心理杂耍的效果，因为双语者的两种语言似乎都很活跃，即使只需要一种语言。或者，语言使用的不同方面可能映射到不同类型的认知后果。这项研究旨在揭示使用多种语言对语言学习以及其他领域学习的影响。计划中的实验将测试双语优势在外语词汇学习的范围，通过使用电生理措施，可以提供一个更敏感的指标的时间过程中的早期学习，比较学习的语言和非语言信息，并确定是否双语优势可以看到在学习的签署与口语。这组实验的目的是确定外语词汇学习的认知机制，从而确定如何从战略上提高外语学习。它将提供关于使用多种语文的重要基础知识，为社会中的教育问题提供信息，因为许多学习者在童年的最早阶段之后都面临着学习第二语言的任务。这项研究还将有助于培训日益多样化的语言科学家群体，包括本身就是双语的本科研究生，并促进Gallaudet大学的科学合作，包括手语和口语。

With National Science Foundation support, Ms. Cari Bogulski will collect data for her doctoral dissertation under the direction of Dr. Judith Kroll and Dr. Janet van Hell. Current research demonstrates that bilinguals are often advantaged relative to their monolingual counterparts on tasks that require cognitive control. A few past studies have also identified a bilingual advantage in the realm of word learning. However, these documented benefits of bilingualism are largely correlational, with little known about the underlying mechanisms that map language use to cognition and learning. One possibility is that all of the documented benefits of bilingualism reflect the effects of the constant mental juggling a bilingual at any age must exercise, as both of a bilingual's two languages appear to be active even when one language alone is required. Alternatively, different aspects of language use may map onto different types of cognitive consequences. The proposed research seeks to uncover the way that the use of multiple languages affects language learning as well as learning in other domains. The planned experiments will test the scope of the bilingual advantage in foreign language vocabulary learning by using electrophysiological measures that may provide a more sensitive index of the time course of early learning, compare the learning of linguistic and nonlinguistic information, and determine whether the bilingual advantage can be seen in the learning of a signed vs. spoken language. The goal of this set of experiments is to identify the cognitive mechanisms that underlie foreign vocabulary learning, and thus, to identify how learning a foreign language can be strategically enhanced.The funded research has a number of broader implications. It will contribute important foundational knowledge about multilingualism that will inform educational issues in a society in which many learners are faced with the task of acquiring a second language past the earliest stages of childhood. The research will also contribute to the training of an increasingly diverse group of language scientists by including undergraduate research students who are themselves bilingual and by fostering scientific collaboration at Gallaudet University to include signed as well as spoken languages.