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Abstract We examined the association between bilingualism, executive function (EF), and brain volume in older monolinguals and bilinguals who spoke English, Spanish, or both, and were cognitively normal (CN) or diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or dementia. Gray matter volume (GMV) was higher in language and EF brain regions among bilinguals, but no differences were found in memory regions. Neuropsychological performance did not vary across language groups over time; however, bilinguals exhibited reduced Stroop interference and lower scores on Digit Span Backwards and category fluency. Higher scores on Digit Span Backwards were associated with a younger age of English acquisition, and a greater degree of balanced bilingualism was associated with lower scores in category fluency. The initial age of cognitive decline did not differ between language groups. The influence of bilingualism appears to be reflected in increased GMV in language and EF regions, and to a lesser degree, in EF.
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Cognitive Control Facilitates Attentional Disengagement during Second Language Comprehension
Bilinguals learn to resolve conflict between their two languages and that skill has been hypothesized to create long-term adaptive changes in cognitive functioning. Yet, little is known about how bilinguals recruit cognitive control to enable efficient use of one of their languages, especially in the less skilled and more effortful second language (L2). Here we examined how real-time cognitive control engagement influences L2 sentence comprehension (i.e., conflict adaptation). We tested a group of English monolinguals and a group of L2 English speakers using a recently-developed cross-task adaptation paradigm. Stroop sequences were pseudo-randomly interleaved with a visual-world paradigm in which participants were asked to carry out spoken instructions that were either syntactically ambiguous or unambiguous. Consistent with previous research, eye-movement results showed that Stroop-related conflict improved the ability to engage correct-goal interpretations, and disengage incorrect-goal interpretations, during ambiguous instructions. Such cognitive-to-language modulations were similar in both groups, but only in the engagement piece. In the disengagement portion, the modulation emerged earlier in bilinguals than in monolinguals, suggesting group differences in attentional disengagement following cognitive control recruitment. Additionally, incorrect-goal eye-movements were modulated by individual differences in working memory, although differently for each group, suggesting an involvement of both language-specific and domain-general resources.
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- PAR ID:
- 10095686
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Brain Sciences
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 2076-3425
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 95
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci9050095
