Past Event

Bilingualism in the Golden Years: a study of the cognitive performance of your language investment!

Christie Brien
(joint work with, Laura Sabourin, Eva Kehayia,  and Gonia Jarema)

Recent research has focused on “The Bilingual Advantage”, whether investigating executive function (Vinerte & Sabourin, 2016), delayed effects of Alzheimer’s (Bialystok, 2010), or increased metalinguistic awareness (Brien, 2012, 2013; Clyne, 2004). However, the bilingual brain across the lifespan remains largely unexplored. In a previous study involving young bilingual adults, I found that acquiring a second language increases one’s sensitivity to language processing cues (syntactic priming, lexical frequency) in the first language. The current study questions whether the same would be found for bilinguals over the age of fifty. Given evidence of excess grey matter in bilinguals contributing to cognitive reserve and protecting against cognitive decline (Abutalebi et al., 2015), this study investigates whether older simultaneous bilinguals differ from younger bilinguals and/or older monolinguals in reaction times and priming effects, thereby providing evidence of differences in the allocation of cognitive resources due to aging. Thus far, 8 older participants (50% simultaneous bilingual) and 80 younger participants (20 monolinguals, 60 bilinguals) have completed a cross-modal lexical decision task. In the task, participants heard a sentence containing a homonym (Mary can train the department in two weeks) and saw a word on a screen which was a) related to the appropriate reading of the homonym (instruct), b) related to the inappropriate reading (locomotive), c) unrelated, or d) a pseudoword. Participants pressed a button to indicate whether this word was a correct word or not.

Initial results show the older participants responding more slowly overall. In the priming condition, the older monolinguals did not differ from older bilinguals, but showed a greater priming effect than younger monolinguals. The older monolinguals were the only group to not show an interfering frequency effect which suggests language processing differences later in life. The older simultaneous bilinguals did not differ from the younger simultaneous bilinguals, suggesting no change in processing strategies with age. Although preliminary, there is evidence of differences in the allocation of cognitive resources between the older groups: while the older monolinguals reveal sensitivities to syntactic priming later in life, the older simultaneous bilinguals maintain sensitivity to the same processing cues into their golden years.

This event is sponsored by the School of Linguistics
and Language Studies.