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TAMU PSYC 689 - Bialystok et al 2004 Biling Aging
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Bilingualism, Aging, and Cognitive Control:Evidence From the Simon TaskEllen BialystokYork UniversityFergus I. M. CraikRotman Research InstituteRaymond KleinDalhousie UniversityMythili ViswanathanYork UniversityPrevious work has shown that bilingualism is associated with more effective controlled processing inchildren; the assumption is that the constant management of 2 competing languages enhances executivefunctions (E. Bialystok, 2001). The present research attempted to determine whether this bilingualadvantage persists for adults and whether bilingualism attenuates the negative effects of aging oncognitive control in older adults. Three studies are reported that compared the performance of mono-lingual and bilingual middle-aged and older adults on the Simon task. Bilingualism was associated withsmaller Simon effect costs for both age groups; bilingual participants also responded more rapidly toconditions that placed greater demands on working memory. In all cases the bilingual advantage wasgreater for older participants. It appears, therefore, that controlled processing is carried out moreeffectively by bilinguals and that bilingualism helps to offset age-related losses in certain executiveprocesses.Research in cognitive aging has advanced enormously in thepast few decades, producing detailed studies and sophisticatedmodels of age-related changes in cognitive functions (see chaptersin Craik & Salthouse, 2000). Most of this research involvesEnglish-speaking participants, and conclusions have been drawnwith little or no regard to the possibility that the participants mightalso speak another language. Yet the existing evidence stronglysuggests that bilingualism has an effect on cognitive processing, atleast for children and younger adults (see chapters in de Groot &Kroll, 1997, and Harris, 1992). What has not been examined iswhether these effects persist over the life span and continue toinfluence changes in cognitive processing in bilingual older adults.One current reality is that bilingualism is increasingly common inmany countries. As an example, the 1996 Canadian Census re-ported that approximately 11% of Canadians spoke English orFrench at home in addition to some other language; when onlyrespondents over age 65 were considered, the figure was 13%(Canada Census 1996, n.d.). In the United States, 17.9% of Amer-icans reported that they spoke a language other than English athome, and it is a reasonable assumption that most of them alsospeak English (U.S. Census Bureau, 2003). Given the prevalenceof bilingualism in North American society (and the prevalence iscertainly greater in most European countries), it is important toestablish the precise effects of bilingualism on cognitive process-ing and the way in which these effects are modulated by aging.Studies involving adult bilinguals have focused largely on psy-cholinguistic aspects of language use, so most of these studies haveinvestigated only bilingual participants to compare processing inthe two languages. A few studies on lexical processing that haveincluded between-groups comparisons have reported bilingual dis-advantages on some tasks, such as lexical decision (Ransdell &Fischler, 1989) and semantic fluency (Gollan, Montoya & Werner,2002). In a review of this literature, Michael and Gollan (in press)point out that these deficits are quite limited, but they attribute theobserved reduction in fluency to the bilingual’s need to maintain avocabulary base approximately twice as large as that of a mono-lingual and to the reduced frequency with which bilinguals accessany particular word. These conditions result in weaker links be-tween words and concepts for bilinguals; semantic fluency tasks,these authors argue, are a measure of the strength of these word–concept associations. Although some research has examined therole of cognitive processes such as working memory in the acqui-sition of a second language (Harrington & Sawyer, 1992; Miyake,1998), very little research has investigated whether those processesare modulated by bilingualism.Research with children has addressed the cognitive impact ofbilingualism more directly. Bilingual advantages have been re-ported across a variety of domains, for example, creativity (Kessler& Quinn, 1987), problem solving (Bain, 1975; Kessler & Quinn,1980), and perceptual disembedding (Duncan & De Avila, 1979).Positive effects for bilinguals, however, have not always beenfound; some studies reported negative effects (Macnamara, 1966),and others found no group differences (Rosenblum & Pinker,1983). The disparate findings can be resolved by considering thecognitive processes implicated in the various tasks used to assessthe effects of bilingualism. In general, tasks showing a bilingualEllen Bialystok and Mythili Viswanathan, Department of Psychology,York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Fergus I. M. Craik, RotmanResearch Institute, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Raymond Klein, Departmentof Psychology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.This research was supported by a grant from the Canadian Institutes ofHealth Research to Ellen Bialystok and Fergus I. M. Craik.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to EllenBialystok, Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele Street,Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada. E-mail: [email protected] and Aging Copyright 2004 by the American Psychological Association2004, Vol. 19, No. 2, 290–303 0882-7974/04/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0882-7974.19.2.290290advantage are characterized by the presence of misleading (usuallyperceptual) information and the need to choose between competingresponse options; tasks based more heavily on analytic knowledgeor detailed representations of knowledge presented without a mis-leading context are solved equally well by monolinguals andbilinguals. This difference corresponds to the difference betweencontrol and representational processes, respectively. The functionscontributing to control include selective attention to relevant as-pects of a problem, inhibition of attention to misleading informa-tion, and switching between competing alternatives. The functionsinvolved with representation include encoding problems in suffi-cient detail, accessing relevant knowledge, and making logicalinferences about relational information. Research by Bialystok hasshown that bilingual children develop control processes morereadily than do monolingual children but that the two groupsprogress at the same


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TAMU PSYC 689 - Bialystok et al 2004 Biling Aging

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