Bilingual Language Control

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People who regularly use more than one language in their daily life, bilinguals, seem to easily switch back and forth between languages without any obvious difficulty. However, recent research studies demonstrated subtle but reliable differences between bilinguals and monolinguals on a variety of tests including both tests that measure linguistic ability and tests that measure other cognitive skills (e.g., the ability to avoid distraction). Such differences have potentially significant implications in all settings where testing occurs, including educational and medical settings. In some cases, bilinguals might appear to be less fluent than monolinguals because they know some words in one of their languages but not in the other. It might seem that allowing bilinguals to switch back and forth between languages during testing should eliminate any testing disadvantage associated with bilingualism. However, language switching can itself introduce disadvantages in some testing situations (e.g., slowing of responses). It is important to identify how people might be affected by their diverse linguistic experiences both for practical reasons related to academic goals and for scientific reasons related to developing an understanding of the human capacity for acquiring and maintaining language skills. Such knowledge will affect an increasing number of Americans as more than 1 in 5 currently speaks a language other than English at home and this number is growing. The proposed studies will compare young to aging Spanish-English bilinguals in a series of behavioral experiments designed to identify 1) how bilingualism and aging jointly affect test performance, and 2) when language switching may enhance the ability to rapidly and fluently produce words and sentences. A driving hypothesis underlying the current work is that language selection is sometimes implemented relatively automatically but at other times requires effort. This hypothesis will be tested by asking how language switching ability changes as bilinguals get older; whereas automatic processes should stay the same in aging, processes that require focused effort should decline. These studies will clarify the relationship between bilingualism and test performance and will specify a well-articulated theoretical model of bilingual language production that may lay the groundwork necessary to develop theory-driven optimization of experience for bilingual individuals in educational and medical settings.