Bilingual Comprehension And Production, Second Language Ability, And Cognitive Control

大众对双语的好处的兴趣激增，几乎完全取代了过去对双语是语言延迟和不明困惑的原因的担忧。事实上，自动跨语言竞争的认知后果，曾经是一种负担，现在被广泛视为非语言认知控制中双语优势的驱动力(见Bialystok，Craik和Luk，2012)。然而，显示双语优势的研究通常依赖于双语者和单语者之间的粗略比较，这两组人在许多其他方面都不同，可能与认知控制有关。因此，也出现了找不到双语者和单语者之间的群体差异的情况(例如，Hilchey&Klein，2011；Kousaie&Phillips，2012)。在过去的5年里，我的实验室对这个问题采取了一种不同的方法，那就是调查双语者之间的双语和认知控制之间的联系，以一种利用双语者差异的方式。使用这一方法，我们发现，在考虑了关键变量，如第二语言能力和一般智力后，认知控制的个体差异与理解(书面和口头)和生产的某些方面有关，但不是所有方面。这些发现与双语理论相一致，该理论认为，反复使用认知控制来解决跨语言冲突构成了认知控制中任何潜在的双语优势的机制。在接下来的5年里，我打算在这项研究计划的基础上，通过三个关键方面来研究(1)认知控制的个体差异如何在两个新的领域(语法冲突和触发的跨语言激活)调节跨语言竞争，(2)使用脑磁图研究跨语言激活和词汇挖掘更基本方面的神经关联，以及(3)有针对性的认知控制训练对双语语言加工的影响。这项工作意义重大，因为它有可能对双语能力做出关键的新发现，这些发现将彻底改变我们对语言和思维在人脑中如何相互作用的理解。

The surge in popular interest regarding the benefits of bilingualism has almost fully supplanted past fears about bilingualism being the cause of linguistic delays and unspecified confusion. Indeed, the cognitive consequences of automatic cross-language competition, once a liability, are now widely viewed as a driving force of bilingual advantages in non-linguistic cognitive control (reviewed in Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2012). However, studies showing bilingual advantages typcially rely on coarse comparisons between bilinguals and monolinguals, two groups that differ in many other ways that potentially relate to cognitive control. Consequently, failures to find group differences between bilinguals and monolinguals have also emerged (e.g., Hilchey & Klein, 2011; Kousaie & Phillips, 2012). In the past 5 years, my laboratory has taken a different approach to this issue, which is to investigate the link between bilingualism and cognitive control, among bilinguals, in a way that capitalizes on how bilinguals differ. Using this approach, we have found that individual differences in cognitive control relate to some but not all aspects of comprehension (written and spoken) and production, after accounting for key variables such as L2 ability and general intelligence. These findings cohere with theories of bilingualism which posit that the repeated "exercise" of using cognitive control to resolve cross-language conflict constitutes the mechanism of any potential bilingual advantage in cognitive control. In the next 5 years, I intend to build on this research program in three crucial ways to investigate (1) how individual differences in cognitive control modulate cross-language competition in two new domains (grammatical conflict & triggered cross-language activation), (2) the neural correlates of more basic aspects of cross-language activation and lexical entrenchment using magnetoencephalography, and (3) the impact of targeted cognitive control training on bilingual language processing. This work is significant in its potential to make crucial new discoveries about bilingualism that will revolutionize our understanding about how language and thought interact in the human brain.