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2 ≠ 2? Rethinking Non-Monolingual Grouping for Behavioural and Neurophysiological Studies in Psycholinguistics
Poster Session E, Friday, October 2, 11:00 am - 1:00 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Ariane Senécal1, Laura Sabourin1; 1University of Ottawa
This project aims to help establish methodological best practices for psycholinguistic research with non-monolinguals, while contributing empirical data to the study of executive function. Its goal is to assess which significant factors, up to and including the number and usage of known languages, must be considered for the design and analysis of future experiments. It builds on two preliminary behavioural studies, presented in previous SNL meetings (Senécal, Gosselin & Sabourin, 2022; Senécal & Sabourin, 2023), which revealed differences between bilinguals and trilinguals completing executive function tasks. The first study saw a potential domain-general monitoring advantage for multilinguals over bilinguals (Costa et al., 2009), alongside distinct language-specific inhibitory control skills; the second revealed significant differences in reaction times as they relate to language entropy and proficiency, and indicated that trilingualism may provide a protective buffer against age-related cognitive decline (Schroeder & Marian, 2017; Pot et al., 2018). These studies were spurred on by the realization that many participants in BI-lingual research possess MULTI-lingual backgrounds, which could pose a challenge to claims made about BI-lingualism. Indeed, de Bot & Jaensch (2015) pointed out that much of the foundational research into language processing in bilinguals has been conducted in the Netherlands, where the Dutch-speaking population widely masters English, but also receives instruction in at least another language. The present project will therefore include a targeted literature review of seminal articles in bilingualism research on executive function—touching on the infamous ‘bilingual advantage’ debate—, focusing on participants’ language backgrounds and how they may relate to the drawn conclusions. So far, the evidence points to multilinguals being speakers with distinct characteristics, rather than bilinguals with extra languages. The project will explore these posited differences by combining comprehensive language background questionnaires with electrophysiological measurements (EEG) of bilingual and trilingual participants completing executive function-related tasks. Participants will be members of important multilingual communities in Canada living in both French-dominant and English-dominant areas (Statistics Canada, 2020): Spanish or Arabic speakers from birth who also speak English (i.e., bilinguals), or who also speak English and French (i.e., trilinguals). They will complete domain-general and language domain-specific experimental tasks relating to inhibitory control (flanker task and bilingual Stroop task–Sabourin & Vīnerte, 2020) and cognitive flexibility (colour-shape shifting task and a cued bilingual lexical decision task–Gosselin & Sabourin, 2024). Per the hypotheses and findings of Gulliver et al. (2021) and the predictions of the UBET framework (DeLuca et al., 2020), we expect the number of languages used by a participant and found in their environment to impact their results. Behavioural and EEG data, including both derived ERP components and resting state brain connectivity measures, are anticipated to show that trilinguals with high engagement with their languages produce reaction times and signal amplitudes and latencies consistent with better performance in the tasks. The careful isolation of individual differences and task specificities will serve to inform the broader perspective. The authors welcome feedback on any aspect of the project under development.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Control, Selection, and Executive Processes