Execitive Control and Language Mode in Monoligual and Biligual Young Adults

Emma Ward

Date of Award

2011

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

Harley,Heidi

Keywords

Executive Control, Language Mode, Bilingualism, Lexical Decision Task, Interlingual Homographs, Simon Task, Flanker Task

Area of Concentration

Psychology

Abstract

Bilingual and monolingual children and adults differ in their performance on tasks that require conflict control, the ability to attend to pertinent information in the face of distractors, but inconsistency in the literature suggests that an additional element is at play. The current study compared monolingual and bilingual young adults� performance on some of these tasks containing conflict before and after a manipulation of language mode, designed to increase the salience of the linguistic context and possibly activate or enhance language group differences. The groups did not differ in their responses to cueing, but their responses to stimulus-response congruence and word types in a lexical decision task (LDT) showed interesting patterns. The bilingual participants showed a decreased congruence effect after the mode manipulation, suggesting that conflict hindered their progress less when their language background was more salient, while the monolingual participants maintained a large congruence effect. On the LDT, those more proficient in their second language responded more slowly than those less proficient before the manipulation but this difference disappeared in the second session, possibly a sign of bilingual participants adapting to the task demands after the manipulation.The previous research on bilingual executive control is fraught with inconsistency and the current study does not resolve those problems, but it does provide support for the relatively new perspective of language mode.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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