Doctoral Dissertation Research: A neurolinguistic investigation on bilingual advantages at learning an additional language

本论文项目测试双语成年人（小时候学习两种语言的人）是否比单语成年人更擅长学习外语。先前的研究表明，双语者在一些任务上比单语者更有优势，包括创造性思维和解决问题的能力。最近，研究人员还声称，双语者比单语者更擅长学习另一种语言，但这一假设尚未得到系统的验证。这个项目将通过让双语成年人学习一种他们还不知道的语言来检验这种假设的优势——事实上，这是一种人工语言，按照设计，他们不可能已经接触过这种语言——并将他们的表现与在相同学习条件下的单语成年人进行比较。参与者对语言的熟练程度，以及他们处理语言时大脑活动的测量，将在两个点进行测试，一次是在学习初期（低熟练程度），一次是在训练结束时（高熟练程度）。该项目还将通过比较课堂学习和沉浸式学习来评估人工语言习得环境的效果。一半的双语参与者将在类似课堂的条件下进行训练；而这组的另一半将在类似沉浸的条件下接受训练。已经收集到的单语组的相应数据表明，当单语学习者达到较高的熟练程度时，他们的大脑模式看起来与大多数语言的母语人士相似，尤其是那些接受过沉浸式训练的人。这表明，单语外语学习者在大脑学习和处理语言的方式上确实可以变得像母语人士一样。将收集双语者的数据并与单语者的数据进行比较。假设的习得新语言的双语优势预测了双语参与者在学习人工语言时比单语参与者更快、更准确。该研究还预测，他们的大脑模式将更类似于母语人士用母语处理句子时的典型模式。由于在当今的全球经济中，学习外语对世界各地许多人的生活做出了重要贡献，而且由于熟练掌握外语对政府的安全需求也至关重要，因此本项目的研究结果可能对教育、政策和安全产生更广泛的影响。

This dissertation project tests whether adults who are bilingual (who learned two languages as children) are better at learning a foreign language than are monolingual adults. Previous research suggests that bilinguals have an advantage over monolinguals at some tasks, including creative thinking and problem solving. Recently, researchers have also claimed that bilinguals are better than monolinguals at learning another language, but this hypothesis has not yet been tested systematically. This project will examine this hypothesized advantage by having bilingual adults learn a language that they don't already know--one that is, in fact, an artificial language, which by design they could not already have been exposed to--and comparing their performance to that of monolingual adults under the same learning conditions. The proficiency that participants attain in the language, as well as measures of their brain activity while they process the language, will be tested at two points, once early on during learning (at low proficiency) and once at the end of training (at high proficiency). The project will also evaluate the effect of the context in which the artificial language is acquired by comparing learning in a classroom to learning in an immersion context. Half of the bilingual participants will train under classroom-like conditions; whereas the second half of this group will receive training under immersion-like conditions. The corresponding data for the monolingual group, which has already been collected, indicates that by the time monolingual learners reach high proficiency, their brain patterns look similar to those of native speakers of most languages, particularly for those who underwent immersion-like training. This suggests that monolingual foreign language learners can indeed become like native speakers in how their brains learn and process the language. The data from bilinguals will be collected and compared to the data from monolinguals. The hypothesized bilingual advantage in acquiring new languages predicts that the bilingual participants will be faster and more accurate than the monolinguals in learning the artificial language. It also predicts that their brain patterns will be even more similar to patterns that are typically found when native speakers process sentences in their own first language. Because learning foreign languages makes an important contribution to the lives of many people the world over in today's global economy, and because proficiency in foreign languages is also critical to the security needs of the government, findings from this project may have broader consequences for education, policy and security.