Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Native Language Adaptation To Novel Verb Argument Structures By Spanish-English Bilinguals: An Electrophysiological Investigation, Eve Higby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilinguals have to learn two different grammatical systems. Some aspects of these grammars may be similar across the two languages (for example, the active-passive alternation) while others may exist in only one of the two grammars (for example, the distinction between recent and distant past). This dissertation investigates the degree to which grammar information specific to only one language is available when processing the other language. In particular, the current study focuses on the application of grammatical structures from the bilinguals’ second-learned language to their first-learned language, a direction of language transfer not often investigated. Based on a Shared Syntax …

Re-Examining The Bilingual Advantage On Interference-Control And Task-Switching Tasks: A Meta-Analysis, Seamus Donnelly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A much-debated topic in psycholinguistics is whether lifelong bilingualism enhances executive functions (EF), the set of higher-order cognitive processes involved in the control of thought and action. Several researchers have predicted bilingual advantages on various EF tasks, especially interference-control and task-switching tasks. Many studies have tested these predictions, but results have proven unreliable. As a complementary approach to recent quantitative syntheses on this topic, the present dissertation tests whether the bilingual advantage is moderated by a number of theoretically significant variables: dependent variable (DV), task, age, age of L2 acquisition and lab.

Two meta-analyses were conducted. Study 1 considered interference-control …

Examining The Intersection Of The Cognitive Advantages And Disadvantages Of The Bilingual Brain, Irina Rabkina

Scripps Senior Theses

Two conflicting findings characterize cognitive processing accompanying bilingualism. The “bilingual advantage” refers to improved cognitive performance for bilingual compared to monolingual participants. Most bilingual advantages fall under the umbrella of cognitive control mechanisms, most frequently demonstrated using the Stroop task and the Simon task (e.g., Bialystok, 2008; Coderre, Van Heuven, & Conklin, 2013). The “bilingual disadvantage,” on the other hand, refers to bilinguals’ diminished performance on tasks that require word retrieval or switching between languages. This study examined the intersection of the bilingual advantage and the bilingual disadvantage to investigate whether they stem from a single cognitive control process. The …

Effects Of Bilingualism On Goal Representation And Maintenance, Amina Saadaoui

Theses Digitization Project

The main focus of this study was to examine whether the bilingual advantage in cognitive control is due to the bilinguals' ability to represent and maintain goal information in working memory. Cognitive control, also referred to as executive control, is the ability to inhibit one cognitive task while executing another task.