AGING AND BILINGUALISM

描述（改编自研究者摘要）： 拟议的研究计划是为了提高对影响的理解， 对双语者语言处理的影响。 拟议 研究，研究人员将扩展新的方法和概念， 关于单语者老龄化的文献， 多语言成人，重点是语言之间的潜力 干扰流利的理解和生产。 拟议 实验集中在语义和/或语言之间的相互作用 抑制，以及它们对词汇通达的贡献 话语语境 参加者将是西班牙语-英语双语者（老年双语者， 正常和应激条件下的大学年龄对照），在 一系列的“在线”（真实的时间）的方法，用于评估字 理解与生产。 所有实验均在两种环境中进行。 西班牙语和英语。 将对个人进行筛选以评估语言 “离线”（不定时）和在线（定时）中的历史和语言优势 situations. 建议的在线任务将包括单词重复（即 “听觉命名”）、图片命名、图片-词启动和图片-词启动。 Stroop任务。 研究者迄今为止的结果与这些子集 方法表明，处理来自语言A的单词的能力， 老年双语者听B语言的速度明显减慢， 年轻的双语者在不利条件下处理相同的刺激。 这些实验室发现对语言转换有一定的启示 双语者在日常生活中通常会遇到的问题。 结果还将提供 信息相关的竞争帐户的认知下降正常 老化（主要基于单语者的研究），包括减缓或 激活减少、工作记忆减少和/或能力降低 以抑制与任务无关的竞争性反应。

DESCRIPTION (Adapted from Investigator's Abstract): The primary purpose of the proposed research program is to improve the understanding of the effects of normal aging on language processing in bilinguals. In the proposed studies, the investigator will extend new methods and concepts from the literature on aging in monolinguals to the special problems faced by multilingual adults, with emphasis on the potential for between-language interference in fluent comprehension and production. The proposed experiments focus on the interplay between semantic and/or linguistic inhibition, and their contribution to lexical access in and out of a discourse context. Participants will be Spanish-English bilinguals (elderly bilinguals, and college-age controls under normal and stressed conditions), tested in a series of "on-line" (real time) methods for the assessment of word comprehension and production. All experiments are administered in both Spanish and English. Individuals will be screened to assess language history and language dominance in "off-line" (untimed) and on-line (timed) situations. The proposed on-line tasks will include word repetition (i.e. "auditory naming"), picture naming, picture-word priming, and picture-word Stroop tasks. The investigator's results to date with a subset of these methods suggest that the ability to process words from Language A while listening to Language B is markedly slowed in elderly bilinguals, and in young bilinguals processing the same stimuli under adverse conditions. These laboratory findings have implications for the language switching commonly experienced by bilinguals in daily life. Results will also provide information relevant to competing accounts of cognitive declines in normal aging (based primarily on studies of monolinguals), including slowed or reduced activation, reductions in working memory, and/or a reduced ability to inhibit competing responses that are not relevant to the task.