Physiological correlates of monolingual and bilingual cognitive development

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Canada is a multicultural and multilingual nation, and many children - across the country - grow up learning more than one language in their homes. Monolingual and bilingual children receive considerably different linguistic inputs in their environments. Despite the fact that bilingual acquisition requires the learning of two sets of linguistic regularities simultaneously, young monolinguals and bilinguals follow the same developmental milestones of language acquisition. What contributes to the learning success of bilingual infants? The general hypothesis of the project is that the developing human mind is capable of adjusting cognitive factors (e.g., attention allocation) to perform necessary computations (e.g., linguistic computations) in an optimal way under different environmental circumstances (e.g. monolingual vs. bilingual learning context). Therefore, the prediction of the current proposal is that cognitive mechanisms that support attention allocation (such as attention arousal, sustained attention, and inhibition) develop differently across monolingual and bilingual infants, as part of their adaptation process to their environments. The proposed research will investigate this hypothesis in a longitudinal study designed for assessing cognitive maturation in monolingual and bilingual infants between 4 and 18 months of age, and adults. The experiments will assess the physiological correlates of attention allocation, which is one of the most important cognitive components that enable learning during early childhood. Changes in attention allocation is associated with certain physiological indicators that can be measured through eye-movements and heart-rate responses. Measuring the physiological components of attention allocation is advantageous because it provides a measurement technique where task-related effects can be minimized. Also, measurements will be taken during linguistic and non-linguistic processing conditions as well. In this way, we can understand whether cognitive adaptation occurs in monolinguals and bilinguals beyond linguistic processing. Understanding the typical cognitive patterns associated with bilingual and monolingual development in respect to the neural-physiological aspects of human development is a timely endeavor in Canada. About half of the population is bilingual, yet our knowledge on the development of the human mind is primarily focused on monolinguals. The findings will inform theoretical and explanatory models from the fields of neurobiology & psycholinguistics. The project will also begin to fill a huge gap in normative data on bilingual and monolingual populations; and ultimately, the data set will contribute to the development of various educational and health assessment tools that are suitable for all Canadians, including monolinguals and bilinguals equally.