On the time course of exogenous cueing effects in bilinguals: Higher proficiency in a second language is associated with more rapid endogenous disengagement

Temperament Affected Visuospatial Orienting on Discrimination Tasks

In the Posner cueing paradigm, the early attentional capture and subsequent inhibition of return (IOR) of attention to the same location, although they are microscale phenomena measured in milliseconds, seem to encapsulate the interaction between two fundamental dimensions of behavior - engaging in and sustaining activity versus withdrawing from and inhibiting activity. In the field of differential psychology, the dynamics of reciprocal relations between these behavioral dimensions have been thought to be determined by central nervous system properties that constitute an individual's temperament. Yet the research on any differential effects of temperament on visuospatial orienting is rather sparse and has produced ambiguous results. Here, we used saccadic responses to measure whether individual differences in reactivity as a temperamental trait might affect orienting of visuospatial attention on discrimination cueing tasks. Our results suggested that, in individuals with lower reactivity, attentional capture took place at a short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), producing a facilitatory cueing effect, which was not the case in those who were higher in reactivity. We explain and discuss these results with the Regulative Theory of Temperament.

Adults at low reading level are sluggish in disengaging spatial attention

An increasing number of studies show that attentional shifting is a primary contributor during the process of learning to read. However, it remains unclear what is the relationship between attentional shifting and word-reading ability in adult readers whose reading skills have matured. More fundamentally, how attentional shifting affects individuals' reading ability remains poorly understood. To address these issues, we grouped adult readers by the level of Chinese character reading and examined the time course of attentional shifting by setting up multiple stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs) in the Posner cue-target paradigm. Based on the phonological mediation hypothesis, we also measured multiple abilities involving phonological processing (i.e., rapid automatic naming and phonological awareness). Results showed that compared with adults at the high reading level, adults at the low reading level showed a selective impairment of attentional disengagement. Rapid automatic naming of Chinese characters played a partially mediating role in the association between attentional shifting and word reading. These results provided evidence for the phonological mediation hypothesis, and suggest that attentional shifting affects word reading by influencing phonological processing in adult Chinese readers.

Are Older Bilinguals' Better in Metaphor Generation?

Metaphor, as widely known, is a figure of speech where a word or phrase is used to describe an object, action, or event to which it cannot be applied exactly. Metaphors are often used figuratively to enable clarity or emphasize the similarities between the two things in a frame. In the current study, we aimed to investigate the relationship between cognitive functions and generating metaphor and their associations in older bilingual and monolingual participants. We conducted the experiment with fifty-six (Bilingual and Monolingual) participants in the age group ranging from 50 to 65 years. We administered the novel and conventional metaphor generation task based on vision words in perceptual domain in Telugu. Followed by a battery of cognitive function tests: Flanker task to study the attention, Semantic Fluency task, Corsi task to check working memory, LexTALE to measure the vocabulary, and a language questionnaire. These tasks are used to investigate the association and correlation between the old age bilingual and monolingual in generating vision metaphors. The current study's findings demonstrate that bilinguals have a considerable advantage in cognitive function and their ability to generate novel metaphors are better when compared to monolinguals.

The Multifaceted Nature of Bilingualism and Attention

Attention has recently been proposed as the mechanism underlying the cognitive effects associated with bilingualism. However, similar to bilingualism, the term attention is complex, dynamic, and can vary from one activity to another. Throughout our daily lives, we use different types of attention that differ in complexity: sustained attention, selective attention, alternating attention, divided attention, and disengagement of attention. The present paper is a focused review summarizing the results from studies that explore the link between bilingualism and attention. For each level of attention, a brief overview of relevant theoretical models will be discussed along with a spotlight on paradigms and tasks used to measure these forms of attention. The findings illustrate that different types and levels of attention are modified by the variety of bilingual experiences. Future studies wishing to examine the effects of bilingualism on attention are encouraged to embrace the complexity and diversity of both constructs rather than making global claims about bilingualism and attention.

Does temperament have a differential effect on Inhibition of Return (IOR)?

Reaction times to targets presented at previously stimulated locations are longer after some time (approx. 300 ms) than to targets presented in new locations. This effect is widely known as Inhibition of Return (IOR). It is typically explained in terms of an inhibitory bias against returning attention to places previously attended to and thus promoting attentional activity elsewhere. Regardless of its attentional character, IOR seems to encapsulate the interaction between two fundamental dimensions of temperament: engaging in versus inhibition and withdrawal from activity. Approaching IOR in this perspective, the question has arisen as to whether individual differences in reactivity as a temperamental trait express themselves in the time course and magnitude of this effect. 90 subjects (30 low, 30 medium and 30 highly reactive individuals) participated in the study. To the best of our knowledge, there are no other studies of individual differences in these parameters of IOR that use saccadic responses to measure its effect on behavior. The results show that in individuals who are higher in terms of their reactivity, IOR starts earlier and continues at the following SOAs but its magnitude is smaller than in less reactive individuals. The results are explained and discussed in light of the Regulative Theory of Temperament. This is the final version of the Abstract which has been accepted in the revised manuscript.

Bilingualism modifies disengagement of attention networks across the scalp: A multivariate ERP investigation of the IOR paradigm

A recent approach to explaining the domain-general cognitive outcomes of bilingualism is to consider the role of disengagement of attention, rather than the engagement of focused attention or inhibition as typical in most accounts. The present study pursues this approach by examining the neurophysiological changes associated with disengagement of attention in young adults performing an inhibition of return (IOR) paradigm while EEG was recorded. Participants were drawn from a diverse community and varied widely in their bilingual experience. There were three main findings. First, dividing the sample into dichotomous groups based on language proficiency did not lead to reliable group differences on the task. Second, using instead continuous measures of bilingualism across the sample indicated that greater bilingual experience and proficiency were associated with the magnitude of the IOR effect, with more bilingual individuals showing larger and earlier IOR effects. Finally, a network of processes that are temporally and spatially distinct were found to work together to produce facilitation, disengagement of attention, and inhibition of return. These findings contribute to debates regarding the electrophysiological correlates of the IOR effect and provide additional evidence for how bilingualism affects domain-general cognition.

When It's Harder to Ignorar than to Ignore: Evidence of Greater Attentional Capture from a Non-Dominant Language

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

Imagine you're driving and you become so distracted by the radio that you miss your turn. Which is more likely to have caught your attention, a broadcast in your native tongue or one in your second language? The present study explores the effect of language proficiency on our ability to inhibit irrelevant phonological information.

METHODOLOGY

Participants were asked to identify which of two drawings changed color while ignoring irrelevant words in either their native language, English, or a less proficient language, Spanish. The drawings appeared on screen for either 200 or 2000ms prior to word-onset, which was followed 200ms later by a color-change. On critical trials, the irrelevant word shared phonological features with the label of the non-target drawing. Trials were blocked by preview time and language.

DATA AND ANALYSIS

Reaction time data from 19 bilinguals were analyzed utilizing generalized linear mixed-effects models, with fixed effects of Competition (competitor vs. control), and Language (English vs. Spanish) and random effects for Subject and Item within each preview window.

FINDINGS/CONCLUSIONS

No interference was observed when participants heard their native tongue in either preview condition. However, participants in the long-preview condition were significantly slower to respond when there was phonological competition in their less proficient language, despite the fact that the task required no language processing.

ORIGINALITY

Past work has indicated that languages are processed more automatically and cause greater interference as proficiency increases. We propose that though higher-proficiency languages may receive greater activation overall, lower-proficiency languages may be more likely to exogenously capture attention due to both relatively greater salience, and relatively less control.

SIGNIFICANCE

The present findings have implications for how we understand the dynamic relationship between language proficiency, activation, and inhibition, suggesting that the salience of the less familiar influences our ability to ignore irrelevant information.

On the ambiguity regarding the relationship between sequential congruency effects, bilingual advantages in cognitive control, and the disengagement of attention

Grundy, Bialystok, and colleagues have reported that at short response-stimulus intervals bilinguals have smaller sequential congruency effects in flanker tasks compared to monolinguals. They interpret these differences to mean that bilinguals are more efficient at disengaging attentional control. Ten empirical studies are presented that show no differences between bilinguals and monolinguals under conditions that produced robust sequential congruency effects. These null results are discussed with respect to the rate at which sequential congruency effects dissipate and the fact these effects are not adaptive in the sense of improving overall performance. Arguments made by Goldsmith and Morton [1] that smaller sequential congruency effects should not be interpreted as "advantages" are extended. Evidence is also presented that neither simple congruency effects, nor sequential congruency effects, correlate across tasks. This lack of convergent validity is inconsistent with the hypothesis that either provides a measure of domain-general control that could underlie an advantage accrued through experience in switching languages. Results from other tasks purporting to show bilingual advantages in the disengagement of attention are also reviewed. We conclude that sequential congruency effects in nonverbal interference tasks and differences in the rate of disengaging attention are unlikely to contribute to our understanding of bilingual language control and that future research might productively examine differences in proactive rather than reactive control.

Language proficiency does not modulate executive control in older bilinguals

We examined if language proficiency modulates performance in tasks that measure executive control in older Telugu-English bilinguals (n = 50, mean age = 57.15 years). We administered numerical Stroop task, Attention Network Task, Dimensional Change Card Sorting task, and stop-signal task that are known to tap into different aspects of executive functioning on healthy aging Telugu-English bilinguals. Second language (English) proficiency was calculated as a cumulative score that considered both subjective and objective measures of L2 fluency and use. Bilinguals were divided into two groups based on the cumulative score and compared on each task. We did not find any effect of language proficiency on any of the executive control measures. The additional Bayesian analysis also supported these findings. Therefore, the results do not support the claim that bilingual language proficiency modulates executive control, at least in the elderly population. We discuss the results with regard to the issue of bilingual advantage in executive control and the role of age and language use.

Bilingual Advantages in Inhibition or Selective Attention: More Challenges

A large sample (N = 141) of college students participated in both a conjunctive visual search task and an ambiguous figures task that have been used as tests of selective attention. Tests for effects of bilingualism on attentional control were conducted by both partitioning the participants into bilinguals and monolinguals and by treating bilingualism as a continuous variable, but there were no effects of bilingualism in any of the tests. Bayes factor analyses confirmed that the evidence substantially favored the null hypothesis. These new findings mesh with failures to replicate language-group differences in congruency-sequence effects, inhibition-of-return, and working memory capacity. The evidence that bilinguals are better than monolinguals at attentional control is equivocal at best.

The Influence of Second Language (L2) Proficiency on Cognitive Control Among Young Adult Unbalanced Chinese-English Bilinguals

The current study investigates the influence of L2 proficiency on cognitive control among three matched groups of unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals. Flanker task was administered to measure conflict monitoring and inhibition, and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) to measure mental set shifting. ANOVA analyses of the Flanker results showed no differences in inhibition across all groups and no interaction between group and condition. However, the Flanker results showed faster performance for the highest L2 proficiency group relative to the lowest L2 proficiency group in all conditions (incongruent, neutral, and congruent), which reflects better ability of conflict monitoring. Finally, ANOVA analyses of the WCST results showed no differences across all groups. These results altogether suggest that L2 proficiency has significant influence on cognitive control, but only in conflict monitoring, not in inhibition or mental set shifting.

Data trimming procedure can eliminate bilingual cognitive advantage

Bilingualism and its cognitive impacts have drawn increasing interest. Recently, inconsistencies in the findings have raised discussions on what might have caused such discrepancies and how evidence should be evaluated. This review tries to shed new light onto the reasons for the inconsistencies by taking a novel perspective. Motivated by the finding that bilingualism affects response time distribution profiles, particularly findings that suggest bilinguals have fewer long responses, we investigated the relation between maximum response times allowed/included in the analysis of an experiment and the finding of a bilingual advantage. We reviewed 68 experiments from 33 articles that compared monolingual and bilingual speakers' performance in three commonly used non-verbal interference tasks (Simon, Spatial Stroop and Flanker). We found that studies that included longer responses in their analysis were more likely to report a bilingualism effect. We conclude that seemingly insignificant details such as the data trimming procedure can have a potential impact on whether an effect is observed. We also discuss the implication of our findings and suggest the usefulness of more fine-grid analytical procedures.

Sequential congruency effects reveal differences in disengagement of attention for monolingual and bilingual young adults

Three studies examined the hypothesis that bilinguals can more rapidly disengage attention from irrelevant information than monolinguals by investigating the impact of previous trial congruency on performance in a simple flanker task. In Study 1, monolingual and bilingual young adults completed two versions of a flanker task. There were no differences between language groups on mean reaction time using standard analyses for congruent or incongruent trials or the size of the flanker effect. Sequential congruency effects (SCEs) however, which account for previous trial congruency, were smaller for bilinguals than for monolinguals. This finding was strongest at the shortest response-to-stimulus interval (RSI). Study 2 replicated this effect using a slightly different flanker task and a shorter RSI than study 1. Study 3 showed that at long RSIs, where behavioral SCE differences between groups disappear because of sufficient time to recover from the previous trial, event-related potentials demonstrated a continued influence of previous trial congruency for monolinguals but not bilinguals at both the N2 and the P3, replicating the reaction time effects in Studies 1 and 2. Together, these studies demonstrate that bilinguals experience less influence from previous trial congruency and have greater ability to disengage attention from the previous trial in order to focus attention on the current trial than is found for monolinguals.

Post-conflict slowing effects in monolingual and bilingual children

Previous research has shown that bilingual children outperform their monolingual peers on a wide variety of tasks measuring executive functions (EF). However, recent failures to replicate this finding have cast doubt on the idea that the bilingual experience leads to domain-general cognitive benefits. The present study explored the role of disengagement of attention as an explanation for why some studies fail to produce this result. Eighty children (40 monolingual, 40 bilingual) who were 7 years old performed a task-switching experiment. In the pure blocks, three simple non-conflict tasks were performed in which children responded by pressing one of two response keys. In the conflict block, occasional bivalent stimuli appeared and created conflict because the irrelevant dimension was mapped to the incorrect response key. The results showed that these bivalent stimuli affected subsequent performance in the conflict block. For monolinguals, the effect of conflict was found for up to 12 trials after the appearance of the bivalent stimulus, but for bilinguals the effect disappeared after only two trials. The results are interpreted as evidence for faster disengagement of attention by bilingual children. Most studies examining EF in monolingual and bilingual children do not examine trial-by-trial adjustments following conflict, but these are essential considerations because relevant processing differences are masked when analyses are applied to data averaged across entire blocks.

Why are bilinguals better than monolinguals at false-belief tasks?

In standard Theory of Mind tasks, such as the Sally-Anne, children have to predict the behaviour of a mistaken character, which requires attributing the character a false belief. Hundreds of developmental studies in the last 30 years have shown that children under 4 fail standard false-belief tasks. However, recent studies have revealed that bilingual children and adults outperform their monolingual peers in this type of tasks. Bilinguals' better performance in false-belief tasks has generally been interpreted as a result of their better inhibitory control; that is, bilinguals are allegedly better than monolinguals at inhibiting the erroneous response to the false-belief question. In this review, I challenge the received view and argue instead that bilinguals' better false-belief performance results from more effective attention management. This challenge ties in with two independent lines of research: on the one hand, recent studies on the role of attentional processes in false-belief tasks with monolingual children and adults; and on the other, current research on bilinguals' performance in different Executive Function tasks. The review closes with an exploratory discussion of further benefits of bilingual cognition to Theory of Mind development and pragmatics, which may be independent from Executive Function.

The relationship between bilingualism and selective attention in young adults: Evidence from an ambiguous figures task

Previous research has shown that bilinguals outperform monolinguals on a variety of tasks that have been described as involving executive functioning, but the precise mechanism for those effects or a clear definition for "executive function" is unknown. This uncertainty has led to a number of studies for which no performance difference between monolingual and bilingual adults has been detected. One approach to clarifying these issues comes from research with children showing that bilinguals were more able than their monolingual peers to perceive both interpretations of an ambiguous figure, an ability that is more tied to a conception of selective attention than to specific components of executive function. The present study extends this notion to adults by assessing their ability to see the alternative image in an ambiguous figure. Bilinguals performed this task more efficiently than monolinguals by requiring fewer cues to identify the second image. This finding has implications for the role of selective attention in performance differences between monolinguals and bilinguals.

Auditory word recognition across the lifespan: Links between linguistic and nonlinguistic inhibitory control in bilinguals and monolinguals

Recent research suggests that bilingual experience reconfigures linguistic and nonlinguistic cognitive processes. We examined the relationship between linguistic competition resolution and nonlinguistic cognitive control in younger and older adults who were either bilingual or monolingual. Participants heard words in English and identified the referent among four pictures while eye-movements were recorded. Target pictures (e.g., cab) appeared with a phonological competitor picture (e.g., cat) and two filler pictures. After each eye-tracking trial, priming probes assessed residual activation and inhibition of target and competitor words. When accounting for processing speed, results revealed that age-related changes in activation and inhibition are smaller in bilinguals than in monolinguals. Moreover, younger and older bilinguals, but not monolinguals, recruited similar inhibition mechanisms during word identification and during a nonlinguistic Stroop task. Results suggest that, during lexical access, bilinguals show more consistent competition resolution and recruitment of cognitive control across the lifespan than monolinguals.

Effect of Exogenous Cues on Covert Spatial Orienting in Deaf and Normal Hearing Individuals

Deaf individuals have been known to process visual stimuli better at the periphery compared to the normal hearing population. However, very few studies have examined attention orienting in the oculomotor domain in the deaf, particularly when targets appear at variable eccentricity. In this study, we examined if the visual perceptual processing advantage reported in the deaf people also modulates spatial attentional orienting with eye movement responses. We used a spatial cueing task with cued and uncued targets that appeared at two different eccentricities and explored attentional facilitation and inhibition. We elicited both a saccadic and a manual response. The deaf showed a higher cueing effect for the ocular responses than the normal hearing participants. However, there was no group difference for the manual responses. There was also higher facilitation at the periphery for both saccadic and manual responses, irrespective of groups. These results suggest that, owing to their superior visual processing ability, the deaf may orient attention faster to targets. We discuss the results in terms of previous studies on cueing and attentional orienting in deaf.

Executive Function Differences Between Bilingual Arabic-English and Monolingual Arabic Children

This study aimed to explore the differences between Arabic-English bilingual and monolingual Arabic children on a battery of executive functions. Prior research on the influence of bilingualism on cognitive abilities and executive functions has shown mixed results. Some results suggested that bilinguals perform significantly better than monolinguals, while others showed that monolinguals perform significantly better. Other studies showed no significant differences between both groups, findings which were argued to be due to methodological issues. A total of 50 Arabic monolingual and Arabic-English bilingual children ranging 7-10 years of age participated in the current study. Six executive function tasks, divided into two categories (inhibition of improper response tasks, and behavioral operational control tasks), were administered. Results did not show significant differences for most executive functions.

Learning and processing of nonverbal symbolic information in bilinguals and monolinguals

Bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals on word learning and on inhibition tasks that require competition resolution. Yet the scope of such bilingual advantages remains underspecified. We compared bilinguals and monolinguals on nonverbal symbolic learning and on competition resolution while processing newly-learned material. Participants were trained on 12 tone-to-symbol mappings, combining timbre, pitch, and duration of tones. During subsequent processing, participants viewed a display with four symbols, and were instructed to identify the symbol that matched a simultaneously-presented tone. On competition trials, two symbols matched the tone in timbre and pitch, but only one matched the tone on timbre, pitch, and duration. No learning differences emerged between 27 Spanish-English bilinguals and 27 English monolinguals, and more successful learners performed better on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary task. During the processing task, competition trials yielded responses with lower accuracies and longer latencies than control trials. Further, in both groups, more successful learning of tone-to-symbol mappings was associated with more successful retrieval during processing. In monolinguals, English receptive vocabulary scores also influenced retrieval efficiency during processing, with English/Spanish vocabulary less related to the novel processing task in bilinguals. Finally, to examine inhibition of competing stimuli, priming probes were presented after each tone-symbol processing trial. These probes suggested that bilinguals, and to a lesser extent monolinguals, showed residual inhibition of competitors at 200 ms post-target identification. Together, findings suggest that learning of novel symbolic information may depend in part on previous linguistic knowledge (not bilingualism per se), and that, during processing of newly-learned material, subtle differences in retrieval and competition resolution may emerge between bilinguals and monolinguals.

Bilinguals use language-control brain areas more than monolinguals to perform non-linguistic switching tasks

We tested the hypothesis that early bilinguals use language-control brain areas more than monolinguals when performing non-linguistic executive control tasks. We do so by exploring the brain activity of early bilinguals and monolinguals in a task-switching paradigm using an embedded critical trial design. Crucially, the task was designed such that the behavioural performance of the two groups was comparable, allowing then to have a safer comparison between the corresponding brain activity in the two groups. Despite the lack of behavioural differences between both groups, early bilinguals used language-control areas – such as left caudate, and left inferior and middle frontal gyri – more than monolinguals, when performing the switching task. Results offer direct support for the notion that, early bilingualism exerts an effect in the neural circuitry responsible for executive control. This effect partially involves the recruitment of brain areas involved in language control when performing domain-general executive control tasks, highlighting the cross-talk between these two domains.

Second language proficiency modulates conflict-monitoring in an oculomotor Stroop task: evidence from Hindi-English bilinguals

Many studies have confirmed the presence of a bilingual advantage which is manifested as enhanced cognitive and attention control. However, very few studies have investigated the role of second language proficiency on the modulation of conflict-monitoring in bilinguals. We investigated this by comparing high and low proficient Hindi-English bilinguals on a modified saccadic arrow Stroop task under different monitoring conditions, and tested the predictions of the bilingual executive control advantage proposal. The task of the participants was to make an eye movement toward the color patch in the same color as the central arrow, ignoring the patch to which the arrow was pointing. High-proficient bilinguals had overall faster saccade latency on all types of trials as compared to the low proficient bilinguals. The overall saccadic latency for high proficiency bilinguals was similarly affected by the different types of monitoring conditions, whereas conflict resolution advantage was found only for high monitoring demanding condition. The results support a conflict-monitoring account in a novel oculomotor task and also suggest that language proficiency could modulate executive control in bilinguals.