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

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

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.******