Doctoral Dissertation Research: Are bilinguals better learners? A neurocognitive investigation of the bilingual advantage

在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，Cari Bogulski女士将在Judith Kroll博士和Janet van Hell博士的指导下为她的博士论文收集数据。目前的研究表明，在需要认知控制的任务中，双语者往往比单语者更有优势。过去的一些研究也发现了双语在单词学习领域的优势。然而，这些记录在案的双语好处在很大程度上是相关的，人们对语言使用与认知和学习之间的潜在机制知之甚少。一种可能性是，所有记录在案的双语好处都反映了任何年龄的双语者必须不断锻炼的心理杂耍的效果，因为双语者的两种语言似乎都很活跃，即使需要单独使用一种语言。另外，语言使用的不同方面可能映射到不同类型的认知结果。这项研究旨在揭示使用多种语言对语言学习以及其他领域学习的影响。计划中的实验将通过电生理测量来测试双语优势在外语词汇学习中的范围，这可能提供一个更敏感的早期学习时间过程指标，比较语言和非语言信息的学习，并确定双语优势是否可以在手语和口语的学习中看到。这组实验的目的是确定外语词汇学习背后的认知机制，从而确定如何从策略上加强外语学习。这项资助的研究有许多更广泛的含义。它将提供关于多语言的重要基础知识，这将为当今社会的教育问题提供信息，在当今社会，许多学习者在童年早期阶段就面临着习得第二语言的任务。这项研究还将有助于培养越来越多样化的语言科学家群体，包括本身就是双语的本科生，并促进加劳德特大学的科学合作，包括手语和口语。

With National Science Foundation support, Ms. Cari Bogulski will collect data for her doctoral dissertation under the direction of Dr. Judith Kroll and Dr. Janet van Hell. Current research demonstrates that bilinguals are often advantaged relative to their monolingual counterparts on tasks that require cognitive control. A few past studies have also identified a bilingual advantage in the realm of word learning. However, these documented benefits of bilingualism are largely correlational, with little known about the underlying mechanisms that map language use to cognition and learning. One possibility is that all of the documented benefits of bilingualism reflect the effects of the constant mental juggling a bilingual at any age must exercise, as both of a bilingual's two languages appear to be active even when one language alone is required. Alternatively, different aspects of language use may map onto different types of cognitive consequences. The proposed research seeks to uncover the way that the use of multiple languages affects language learning as well as learning in other domains. The planned experiments will test the scope of the bilingual advantage in foreign language vocabulary learning by using electrophysiological measures that may provide a more sensitive index of the time course of early learning, compare the learning of linguistic and nonlinguistic information, and determine whether the bilingual advantage can be seen in the learning of a signed vs. spoken language. The goal of this set of experiments is to identify the cognitive mechanisms that underlie foreign vocabulary learning, and thus, to identify how learning a foreign language can be strategically enhanced.The funded research has a number of broader implications. It will contribute important foundational knowledge about multilingualism that will inform educational issues in a society in which many learners are faced with the task of acquiring a second language past the earliest stages of childhood. The research will also contribute to the training of an increasingly diverse group of language scientists by including undergraduate research students who are themselves bilingual and by fostering scientific collaboration at Gallaudet University to include signed as well as spoken languages.