Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T21:53:31.406Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What bilinguals do with language that changes their minds and their brains

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 August 2014

Judith F. Kroll  and
Melinda Fricke
Judith F. Kroll
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
Melinda Fricke
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the last two decades, there has been an upsurge of research on bilingualism recognizing that bilinguals may be more representative language users than their monolingual peers (e.g., Kroll, Dussias, Bogulski, & Valdes Kroff, 2012). The excitement about bilinguals is related not only to their neglected status in the past literature but also to a set of twin discoveries that have catapulted research on bilingualism into central view in psycholinguistics, cognitive and developmental neuroscience, and gerontology. One of these discoveries is that both languages are active when bilinguals read, listen to speech, and plan speech in either of their two languages (for a review, see Kroll et al., 2012). The other discovery is that bilingualism appears to confer a set of consequences to domain general cognition and to the neural structures that support it (e.g., Bialystok, Craik, Green, & Gollan, 2009). Those consequences are observed across the lifespan and are particularly evident when cognitive resources are challenged because of the normal or pathological trajectory of aging (e.g., Gold, Kim, Johnson, Kriscio, & Smith, 2013). The focus of the new research is on how these two discoveries might be related. The parallel activity of the two languages and the interactions across them require that the bilingual develops skill in language selection to enable fluent performance. The hypothesis that has guided the recent flurry of research is that bilingual minds and brains change as a consequence of having to regulate the two languages. In their Keynote Article, Baum and Titone provide a comprehensive and current summary of the existing evidence on this hypothesis.

Type
Commentaries
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 35 , Issue 5 , September 2014 , pp. 921 - 925
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Baum, S., & Titone, D. (2014). Moving toward a neuroplasticity view of bilingualism, executive control, and aging. Applied Psycholinguistics, 35, 857–894.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M., Green, D. W., & Gollan, T. H. (2009). Bilingual minds. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 10, 89–129.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bosch, L., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2003). Simultaneous bilingualism and the perception of a language-specific vowel contrast in the first year of life. Language and Speech, 46, 217–243.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Blumenfeld, H. K., & Marian, V. (2011). Bilingualism influences inhibitory control in auditory comprehension. Cognition, 118, 245–257.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gold, B. T., Kim, C., Johnson, N. F., Kriscio, R. J., & Smith, C. D. (2013). Lifelong bilingualism maintains neural efficiency for cognitive control in aging. Journal of Neuroscience, 33, 387–396.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Green, D. W., & Abutalebi, J. (2013). Language control in bilinguals: The adaptive control hypothesis. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 25, 515–530.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Johnson, J. S., & Newport, E. L. (1989) Critical period effects in second language learning: The influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language. Cognitive Psychology, 21, 60–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kaushanskaya, M., & Marian, V. (2009). The bilingual advantage in novel word learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16, 705–710.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kovács, A. M., & Mehler, J. (2009). Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 6556–6560.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kroll, J. F., & Bialystok, E. (2013). Understanding the consequences of bilingualism for language processing and cognition. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 25, 497–514.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kroll, J. F., Dussias, P. E., Bogulski, C. A., & Valdes-Kroff, J. (2012). Juggling two languages in one mind: What bilinguals tell us about language processing and its consequences for cognition. In Ross, B. (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 56, pp. 229–262). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Luk, G., & Bialystok, E. (2013). Bilingualism is not a categorical variable: Interaction between language proficiency and usage. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 25, 605–621.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morford, J. P., Wilkinson, E., Villwock, A., Piñar, P. & Kroll, J. F. (2011). When deaf signers read English: Do written words activate their sign translations? Cognition, 118, 286–292.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Petitto, L. A., Berens, M. S., Kovelman, I., Dubins, M. H., Jasinska, K., & Shalinsky, M. (2012). The “Perceptual Wedge Hypothesis” as the basis for bilingual babies’ phonetic processing advantage: New insights from fNIRS brain imaging. Brain and Language, 121, 130–143.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Piske, T., MacKay, I. R. A., & Flege, J. E. (2001). Factors affecting the degree of foreign accent in an L2: A review. Journal of Phonetics, 29, 191–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sebastián-Gallés, N., Albareda-Castellot, B., Weikum, W. M., & Werker, J. F. (2012). A bilingual advantage in visual language discrimination in infancy. Psychological Science, 23, 994–999.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Steinhauer, K., White, E. J., & Drury, J. E. (2009). Temporal dynamics of late second language acquisition: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Second Language Research, 25, 13–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wu, Y. J., & Thierry, G. (2013). Fast modulation of executive function by language context in bilinguals. Journal of Neuroscience, 33, 13533–13537.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed