Cognitive Processes of Bilinguals

描述（由申请人提供）：直到最近，认知科学还忽视了一个事实，即世界上大多数人，以及越来越多的美国人都是双语者。在过去十年中，这种情况发生了显著变化。现在有一种观点认为，学习和使用一种以上的语言是认知的自然情况。双语研究不仅为认知原则的普遍性提供了重要证据，而且还为揭示认知架构中的约束提供了重要工具。虽然精通双语的人很少会犯说错语言的错误，或者认为他们正在阅读的文本不是他们想要的语言，但最近对词汇识别和口语生产中的词汇获取的认知研究表明，关于两种语言的信息是活跃的，至少是短暂的，即使是在阅读和口语等高技能任务中。当使用另一种语言时，缺乏一种简单的机制来切换两种语言中的一种，这表明熟练的双语者拥有一种复杂的方法来控制他们的表现。由于这个原因，双语已经成为心理学家的一个重要工具，他们希望模拟发展中的系统，它们之间的竞争，以及执行控制的后果。本研究的目标是使用行为和神经认知方法来确定在每种双语语言的言语规划中解决跨语言竞争的因素。计划研究的具体目的是确定每种语言的言语规划活动有多深，双语形式如何调节这种活动，以及语言习得和使用的哪些环境减少了跨语言竞争。拟议的研究将提供关于多语言的重要基础知识，这将为日益多样化的社会中的教育和健康问题提供信息，在这个社会中，许多学习者在童年早期阶段就面临着学习第二语言的任务。这项研究还将通过培养比认知科学和认知神经科学领域更多样化的学生群体，以及通过促进国际科学合作，为科学基础设施做出贡献。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Until recently, cognitive science ignored the fact that most people of the world, and an increasing number of people in the US, are bilingual. In the past ten years this situation has changed markedly. There is now an appreciation that learning and using more than one language is a natural circumstance of cognition. Not only does research on bilingualism provide crucial evidence regarding the universality of cognitive principles, but it also provides an important tool for revealing constraints within the cognitive architecture. Although proficient bilinguals rarely make the error of speaking words in the wrong language or thinking that they are reading text in a language other than the one intended, recent cognitive research on lexical access in word recognition and in spoken production suggests that information about both languages is active, at least briefly, in even highly skilled tasks such as reading and speaking. The absence of a simple mechanism to switch off one of the two languages when using the other suggests that skilled bilinguals possess a sophisticated means of controlling their performance. For this reason, bilingualism has become an important tool for psychologists who wish to model developing systems, the competition between them, and the consequences for executive control. The goal of the proposed research is to use behavioral and neurocognitive methods to identify factors that permit cross-language competition to be resolved in the planning of speech in each of the bilingual's languages. The specific aims of the planned research are to determine how far into speech planning there is activity of each language, how the form of bilingualism modulates this activity, and what contexts of language acquisition and use reduce cross-language competition. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE The proposed research will contribute important foundational knowledge about multilingualism that will inform educational and health issues in an increasingly diverse society in which many learners are faced with the task of learning to speak a second language past the earliest stages of childhood. The research will also contribute to the infrastructure of science by training a more diverse group of students than is typical in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience and by fostering international scientific collaboration.