Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions
Investigating bilingual advantage in selective attention activation from early childhood to adolescence: A museum-based fNIRS study
Poster Session A, Wednesday, September 30, 11:00 am - 1:00 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Gavkhar Abdurokhmonova1, Alicia Mortimer1, Meredith Pecukonis2, Rachel Romeo1; 1University of Maryland, 2Smith College
Auditory selective attention is a fundamental executive functioning (EF) skill that allows us to flexibly attend to a target auditory input while inhibiting competing noise. This skill is critical for speech perception in noisy environments such as schools. Research finds that bilingual individuals may have enhanced EF due to constant training in using one and inhibiting another language. Recent studies showing null evidence to this phenomenon, however, suggest that there might be more nuance to the bilingualism-EF relationship. Given the vast individual variation across bilinguals (i.e., country/culture of origin, age of exposure, proficiency, number of languages understood/spoken, etc.), it is important to consider more fine-grained differences in mechanisms of how language experiences might affect the development of EF from early childhood to adolescence. The current study investigates how the brain’s language network functions during an auditory selective attention task, and whether this varies across individuals from bilingual/multilingual vs monolingual backgrounds. Participants were English speakers (either native or later learners) aged 4 years or older visiting a language-themed museum. They reported basic information on demographic (e.g., age, gender, race, ethnicity, education) and linguistic background (level of understanding, speaking, and reading in other languages; age of acquisition). They then completed a 10-minute auditory selective attention task while functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) data was collected from bilateral inferior frontal (IFG) and superior temporal (STG) language regions. Participants heard 15-second stories in English in three different conditions (six trials per condition): normally played in both ears (binaural condition), backwards in both ears (backward condition), and two different stories in each ear – one male voice, one female (dichotic condition). They were instructed to always listen to the female voice. After each forward and dichotic trial, participants were asked a simple comprehension question and pressed the screen to respond. After each question-answer period there was a 6 second countdown to account for the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal delay. A total of n=276 (age range = 4-85 years) participants completed the study, and we report results from the subset of n=60 child participants (Range=4-14; Mage=9.63; SD=2.62; n=25 male). Mixed effects models were used to examine accuracy and reaction time on the comprehension questions. Interestingly, participants were more accurate (B=.06, p =.047) and faster (B=-0.42, p=0.008) on dichotic trials, perhaps because they focused harder. Older children responded more accurately (B=0.05, p<.001) and faster (B= -0.17, p=.034). Bilinguals were marginally more accurate (B=0.08, p=.08), but not faster or slower than monolinguals. fNIRS neuroimaging data analyses from dichotic>binaural speech will reveal individual differences in activation patterns for the auditory selective attention task across participants. In conclusion, this study will reveal important neurocognitive mechanisms of EF-elicited activation in the higher-order language network and how these mechanisms vary across participants with monolingual/bilingual experiences from early childhood to adolescent years. The naturalistic setting (i.e., museum) of data collection by the means of using fNIRS in outside-of-lab environment provides a unique opportunity to obtain ecologically valid prefrontal and auditory cortex activation in a widely diverse sample (e.g., age, race/ethnicity, linguistic background, socioeconomic status, etc.).
Topic Areas: Multilingualism,