Poster #108 - Language Contexts Affect Bilinguals' Attentional Control

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

In recent years, research interest on bilingualism and its relation to cognitive control has grown. Given that engaging in the cognitive processes of language management is likely to result in changes to the neural system to improve cognitive efficiency, bilingualism is expected to positively benefit cognitive control (reviewed in Bialystok, 2017). Bialystok (2015, 2017) proposed that the attention system is what underlies how bilingual experience might improve cognitive control, as the bilingual experience may cause changes in the way that attention is directed to the environment.
However, the experience of bilingualism is varied. Most bilinguals do not have equivalent proficiencies and experiences in both their languages, and hence would have a dominant and a weaker language, albeit to differing extents across individuals. The varying language contexts of bilingual interactions are posited to require varying cognitive demands (Green & Abutalebi, 2013). In order for bilingualism to benefit attention, the bilingual needs to be exposed to language contexts in which attentional control is demanded, such as mixed language contexts where both languages are to be attended, or a context where the weaker language alone is required and attention is needed to avoid interference from the dominant language. Attentional control demands are likely to be lower in comparison when only the dominant language is required, since less interference is expected from the weaker language. Hence, we sought to examine whether exposing children to different linguistic contexts would affect their subsequent performance on the Child-Attention Network Task (ANT). We hypothesize that the weaker language and mixed language contexts would invoke an increased demand of attentional control, resulting in better performance on the ANT, as compared to the dominant language context.
Participants were 71 English-Mandarin Chinese bilingual children attending Kindergarten-1 in Singapore in local childcare centers (M = 65.72 months, SD = 3.70), exposed to both English and Mandarin at home and in school. They were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: before completing the ANT, they had to complete a simple picture-recognition task either (1) in their dominant language (DOM condition; n = 25), (2) in their weaker language (WEAK condition; n = 21), or (3) in a mixture of the two languages (SWITCH condition; n = 25). One-way between groups ANOVAs conducted separately for overall accuracy, overall RT and the three ANT network scores found: (1) a main effect of language context on overall accuracy, where those in the DOM condition were significantly less accurate than those in the WEAK and SWITCH conditions, with no significant differences between the latter two; (2) a main effect of language context on overall RT, where those in the DOM condition were significantly slower than those in the WEAK condition (Bonferroni corrected). No significant differences were found for any of the network scores. Findings suggest that in language contexts that increase attentional demands, children’s attentional control is higher than contexts with lower demands, and that the surrounding language context may affect how much effort a child engages in attentional control. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Author

• Clara Chan, Singapore University of Technology & Design
  Presenting Author