Early and Emergent Bilinguals: The Role of Cognitive Control in the Processing of Linguistic Conflict
Year: 2020
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Language processing requires frequent resolution of conflict (e.g.temporary ambiguities, conflicting parsing principles, see Jegerski, 2012).This conflict triggers cognitive control, which has been shown to be a major player in disambiguation among monolinguals (Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter & Cohen, 2001;January, Trueswell & Thompson-Schill, 2009).Cognitive control is also a variable of considerable interest in research on early bilingualism and on emergent (second language) bilingualism, as it is responsible for non-active language suppression (Kroll, Dussias, Bogulski, & Valdes Kroff, 2012).For example, many studies reveal cognitive control advantages for early bilinguals in conflict resolution tasks like the flanker task (see Kroll & Bialystok, 2013).Meanwhile, prefrontal brain regions associated with cognitive control are highly active during non-native, non-highly proficient language processing, but that activity diminishes for proficient or native processing (Abutalebi, 2008).However, further research is needed to understand how cognitive control resources are allocated when both disambiguation and non-active language suppression are necessary.To that end, this dissertation investigated linguistic conflict resolution by early bilinguals and by emergent bilinguals.The participants were 29 Catalan-Spanish early bilinguals (Experiment 1) and 40 L2 Spanish learners at varying proficiency levels (Experiment 2).Following recent research on monolinguals (Hsu & Novick, 2016), the experimental design leveraged the Gratton effect (sustained cognitive control following
Author: Timothy McCormick
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3090732559