Social Psychology Commons^™

Bilingual Interactional Contexts Predict Executive Functions In Older Adults, Hwajin Yang, Yue Qi Germaine Tng, Gilaine Rui Ng, Wee Qin Ng

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Drawing on the adaptive control hypothesis, we examined whether older adults' bilingual interactional contexts of conversational exchanges would predict important indices of executive functions (EF). We assessed participants' engagement in each bilingual interactional context - single-language, dual-language, and dense code-switching - and their performance on a series of nonverbal EF measures. Sixty-nine healthy older adults (M-age = 70.39 years; ages 60-93) were recruited from local community centers. We found that the dense code-switching context was associated with enhanced overall EF, but not individual facets of EF (inhibitory control, shifting, and updating). These findings held true when we controlled for a …