Language Sparing in Bilingual Aging

双语老龄化中的语言保留

基本信息

批准号：
7281611
负责人：
Mira Goral
金额：
$ 6.97万
依托单位：
HERBERT H. LEHMAN COLLEGE
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
财政年份：
2006
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2006-09-01 至 2009-02-28
项目状态：
已结题

项目摘要

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): New research evidence suggests that bilingual adults have an advantage over monolingual adults in selected cognitive skills and that this advantage is maintained in older age. Yet, bilingual speakers are commonly excluded from studies of cognitive aging in this country. This proposed study will examine performance of bilingual individuals across the adult life-span on measures currently employed in our larger study, the Language in the Aging Brain lab (AG14345). Proficient bilingual individuals will be recruited and tested on measures of cognitive skills, such as executive function, and language skills, such as lexical retrieval and spoken language comprehension. The results of this study will allow us to comprehensively examine whether older bilingual adults do not demonstrate the cognitive decline found with monolingual older adults. Furthermore, the study will provide us with the unique opportunity to identify whether there is a dissociation between age-related changes in cognition and language by testing whether older bilingual individuals who do not show age-related differences on specific cognitive tests nevertheless demonstrate age-related language differences. This research study will include younger and older adults who speak a language other than English as their first language and therefore will allow us to generalize our conclusions about age-related language decline to a larger, more representative sample of the older population of today. Moreover, the results of this study will provide answers to questions concerning the causal relations among specific cognitive skills and specific language skills that have been shown to decline with age.

描述（由申请人提供）：新的研究证据表明，双语成年人比单语成年人在选定的认知技能方面具有优势，并且这种优势在老年时保持。然而，双语说话者通常被排除在这个国家的认知衰老研究之外。这项拟议的研究将检查整个成人寿命中双语个体的表现，这是我们较大的研究中目前采用的措施，即衰老脑实验室的语言（AG14345）。熟练的双语个人将受到认知技能的衡量标准，例如执行功能和语言技能，例如词汇检索和口语理解。这项研究的结果将使我们能够全面研究年龄较大的双语成年人是否没有证明单语老年人的认知能力下降。此外，这项研究将为我们提供独特的机会，通过测试与年龄相关的认知和语言变化之间是否存在分离，通过测试是否没有在特定认知测试上显示与年龄相关的年龄差异的年龄差异，但仍表现出与年龄相关的语言差异。这项研究将包括年轻的和老年人，他们说英语以外的语言是其第一语言，因此我们将使我们对与年龄相关的语言下降的结论概括为当今老年人群的更大，更具代表性的样本。此外，这项研究的结果将为有关特定认知能力和特定语言技能之间因果关系的问题提供答案，这些问题已证明随着年龄的增长而下降。