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

双语理解与表达、第二语言能力、认知控制

• 批准号: 261769-2013
• 负责人: Titone, Debra
• 金额: $ 2.62万
• 依托单位: McGill University
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2018-01-01 至 2019-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=666876
• 关键词: Bilingual; Comprehension; Production; Second; Language

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.******

公众对双语好处的兴趣激增，几乎完全取代了过去对双语会导致语言延迟和不明原因的困惑的担忧。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（Bialystok, Craik, & 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，这两个群体在许多其他可能与认知控制有关的方面存在差异。因此，也出现了未能发现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不同的方法，即以一种利用双语者之间的差异的方式，调查双语与认知控制之间的联系。使用这种方法，我们发现，在考虑了第二语言能力和一般智力等关键变量后，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，使用认知控制来解决跨语言冲突的反复“练习”构成了认知控制中任何潜在双语优势的机制。在接下来的5年里，我打算在这个研究项目的基础上，从三个重要的方面来研究：(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）中调节跨语言竞争，(2)使用脑磁图研究跨语言激活和词汇巩固的更基本方面的神经关联，(3)有针对性的认知控制训练对双语语言加工的影响。这项工作很重要，因为它有可能对双语现象做出重要的新发现，这将彻底改变我们对人类大脑中语言和思维如何相互作用的理解。******