Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-lvwk9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-06T07:15:49.906Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Bilingual children show an advantage in controlling verbal interference during spoken language comprehension*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2014

ROBERTO FILIPPI ,
JOHN MORRIS ,
FIONA M. RICHARDSON ,
PETER BRIGHT ,
MICHAEL S.C. THOMAS ,
ANNETTE KARMILOFF-SMITH  and
VIORICA MARIAN
ROBERTO FILIPPI*
Affiliation:
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge Birkbeck, University of London
JOHN MORRIS
Affiliation:
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
FIONA M. RICHARDSON
Affiliation:
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge Birkbeck, University of London
PETER BRIGHT
Affiliation:
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
MICHAEL S.C. THOMAS
Affiliation:
Birkbeck, University of London
ANNETTE KARMILOFF-SMITH
Affiliation:
Birkbeck, University of London
VIORICA MARIAN
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Chicago
*
Address for correspondence: Roberto Filippi, Anglia Ruskin University, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Science & Technology, East Road, Cambridge CB1 1PTroberto.filippi@anglia.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Studies measuring inhibitory control in the visual modality have shown a bilingual advantage in both children and adults. However, there is a lack of developmental research on inhibitory control in the auditory modality. This study compared the comprehension of active and passive English sentences in 7–10 years old bilingual and monolingual children. The task was to identify the agent of a sentence in the presence of verbal interference. The target sentence was cued by the gender of the speaker. Children were instructed to focus on the sentence in the target voice and ignore the distractor sentence. Results indicate that bilinguals are more accurate than monolinguals in comprehending syntactically complex sentences in the presence of linguistic noise. This supports previous findings with adult participants (Filippi, Leech, Thomas, Green & Dick, 2012). We therefore conclude that the bilingual advantage in interference control begins early in life and is maintained throughout development.

Keywords

bilingualismexecutive functionsentence comprehensionspoken language processinginhibitory controlcontrol of interference
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 490 - 501
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This study was funded by a private investor based in London, who asked to remain anonymous; we appreciate his generosity. We also thank Mrs. Birch, Headteacher of the Histon & Impington Junior School, her staff, the children and the parents who enthusiastically helped us to carry out this research. Preparation of this manuscript was supported in part by grant NICHD-RO1HD059858 to the last author.

References

Abutalebi, J., & Green, D. W. (2008). Control mechanisms in bilingual language production: Neural evidence from language switching studies. Language and cognitive processes, 23 (4), 557–582.Google Scholar
Abbate, M. S., & LaChapelle, N. B. (1984b). Pictures, please! An articulation supplement. Tucson, AZ: Communication Skill Builders, Inc.Google Scholar
Annaz, D., Karmiloff-Smith, A., & Thomas, M. S. C. (2008). The importance of tracing developmental trajectories for clinical child neuropsychology. In Reed, J. & Warner Rogers, J. (Eds.), Child neuropsychology: Concepts, theory and practice. Oxford, England: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bak, T. H., Nissan, J. J., Allerhand, M. M., & Deary, I. J. (2014). Does bilingualism influence cognitive aging?. Annals of Neurology.Google Scholar
Bak, T. H., Vega-Mendoza, M., & Sorace, A. (2014). Never too late? An advantage on tests of auditory attention extends to late bilinguals. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 485.Google Scholar
Bates, E., McNew, S., MacWhinney, B., Devescovi, A., & Smith, S. (1982). Functional constraints on sentence processing: A cross-linguistic study. Cognition, 11 (3), 245–299.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E. (1982). On the relationship between knowing and using linguistic forms1. Applied Linguistics, 3 (3), 181–206.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E. (1988). Levels of bilingualism and levels of linguistic awareness. Developmental Psychology, 24 (4), 560–567.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E. (1999). Cognitive complexity and attentional control in the bilingual mind. Child Development, 70 (3), 636–644.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E. (2005). Consequences of bilingualism for cognitive development. Handbook of bilingualism, 417–432.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I., & Freedman, M. (2007). Bilingualism as a protection against the onset of symptoms of dementia. Neuropsychologia, 45 (2), 459–464.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I., Klein, R., & Viswanathan, M. (2004). Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: Evidence from the Simon task. Psychology and aging, 19, 290–303.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I., Green, D. W., & Gollan, T. H. (2009). Bilingual minds. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 10 (3), 89–129.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E., & Luk, G. (2012). Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual adults. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15 (02), 397–401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E., Luk, G., Peets, K. F., & Yang, S. (2010). Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13 (04), 525–531.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E., & Feng, X. (2011). Language proficiency and its implications for monolingual and bilingual children. Language and literacy development in bilingual settings, 121–138.Google Scholar
Bilger, R. C., Nuetzel, J. M., Rabinowitz, W. M., & Rzeczkowski, C. (1984). Standardization of a test of speech perception in noise. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 27 (1), 32.Google Scholar
Blumenfeld, H. K., & Marian, V. (2011). Bilingualism influences inhibitory control in auditory comprehension. Cognition, 118 (2), 245–257.Google Scholar
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2010). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 5.1.38, retrieved 2 July 2010 from http://www.praat.org/ Google Scholar
Carlson, S. M., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2008). Bilingual experience and executive functioning in young children. Developmental science, 11 (2), 282–298.Google Scholar
Cook, R. D. (1977). Detection of influential observation in linear regression. Technometrics, 15–18.Google Scholar
Costa, A., & Caramazza, A. (1999). Is lexical selection in bilingual speech production language-specific? Further evidence from Spanish–English and English–Spanish bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2 (03), 231–244.Google Scholar
Costa, A., Hernández, M., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2008). Bilingualism aids conflict resolution: Evidence from the ANT task. Cognition, 106 (1), 59–86.Google Scholar
Craik, F. I., Bialystok, E., & Freedman, M. (2010). Delaying the onset of Alzheimer disease Bilingualism as a form of cognitive reserve. Neurology, 75 (19), 1726–1729.Google Scholar
Crinion, J., Turner, R., Grogan, A., Hanakawa, T., Noppeney, U., Devlin, J. T., . . . & Price, C. J. (2006). Language control in the bilingual brain. Science, 312 (5779), 1537–1540.Google Scholar
de Haan, M. (2013). Attention and executive control. In Mareschal, D., Butterworth, B., & Tolmie, A. (Eds.). (2013). Educational Neuroscience. John Wiley & Sons Google Scholar
Diamond, A. (2001). Looking closely at infants’ performance and experimental procedures in the A-not-B task. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24 (1), 38–41.Google Scholar
Dijkstra, T., Van Jaarsveld, H., & Brinke, S. T. (1998). Interlingual homograph recognition: Effects of task demands and language intermixing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1 (01), 51–66.Google Scholar
Driver, J. (2001). A selective review of selective attention research from the past century. British Journal of Psychology, 92 (1), 53–78.Google Scholar
Dunn, L. M., Dunn, L. M., Whetton, C., & Burley, J. (1997). British picture vocabulary scale Windsor. UK: NFER-Nelson.Google Scholar
Filippi, R., Leech, R., Thomas, M. S., Green, D. W., & Dick, F. (2012). A bilingual advantage in controlling language interference during sentence comprehension. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15, 858–872.Google Scholar
Filippi, R., Karaminis, T., & Thomas, M. S. Language switching in bilingual production: Empirical data and computational modelling. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1–22.Google Scholar
Filippi, R., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (2012). 8 What can neurodevelopmental disorders teach us about typical development?. Current Issues in Developmental Disorders, 193.Google Scholar
Filippi, R., Richardson, F. M., Dick, F., Leech, R., Green, D. W., Thomas, M. S., & Price, C. J. (2011). The right posterior paravermis and the control of language interference. The Journal of Neuroscience, 31, 10732–10740.Google Scholar
Finkbeiner, M., Gollan, T., & Caramazza, A. (2006). Bilingual lexical access: what is the (hard) problem. Biling.(Camb. Engl.), 9, 153–166.Google Scholar
Forster, S., & Lavie, N. (2008). Failures to ignore entirely irrelevant distractors: The role of load. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 14 (1), 73.Google ScholarPubMed
Gollan, T. H., Montoya, R. I., Fennema-Notestine, C. & Morris, S. K. (2005). Bilingualism affects picture naming but not picture classification. Memory & Cognition, 33, 1220–1234.Google Scholar
Green, D. W. (1986). Control, activation, and resource: A framework and a model for the control of speech in bilinguals. Brain and Language, 27, 210–223.Google Scholar
Green, D. W. (1998). Mental control of the bilingual lexicosemantic system. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1, 67–81.Google Scholar
Hoshino, N., & Thierry, G. (2011). Language selection in bilingual word production: electrophysiological evidence for cross-language competition. Brain research, 1371, 100–109.Google Scholar
Kalikow, D. N., Stevens, K. N., & Elliott, L. L. (1977). Development of a test of speech intelligibility in noise using sentence materials with controlled word predictability. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 61 (5), 1337–1351.Google Scholar
Kovács, Á. M., & Mehler, J. (2009). Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106 (16), 6556–6560.Google Scholar
Krizman, J., Marian, V., Shook, A., Skoe, E., & Kraus, N. (2012). Subcortical encoding of sound is enhanced in bilinguals and relates to executive function advantages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109 (20), 7877–7881.Google Scholar
Leech, R., Aydelott, J., Symons, G., Carnevale, J., & Dick, F. (2007). The development of sentence interpretation: effects of perceptual, attentional and semantic interference. Developmental science, 10, 794–813.Google Scholar
Lin, F. R., Metter, E., O’Brien, R. J., Resnick, S. M., Zonderman, A. B., Ferrucci, L. (2011) Hearing Loss and Incident Dementia. Arch Neurol, 68 (2), 214–220.Google Scholar
Linck, J. A., Kroll, J. F., & Sunderman, G. (2009). Losing access to the native language while immersed in a second language: Evidence for the role of inhibition in second-language learning. Psychological Science, 20 (12), 1507–1515.Google Scholar
Macizo, P., Bajo, T., & Cruz Martín, M. (2010). Inhibitory processes in bilingual language comprehension: Evidence from Spanish–English interlexical homographs. Journal of Memory and Language, 63 (2), 232–244.Google Scholar
Marian, V., & Spivey, M. (2003). Competing activation in bilingual language processing: Within-and between-language competition. Bilingualism Language and Cognition, 6 (2), 97–115.Google Scholar
Martin-Rhee, M. M., & Bialystok, E. (2008). The development of two types of inhibitory control in monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11 (1), 81.Google Scholar
Mayo, L. H., Florentine, M., & Buus, S. (1997). Age of second language acquisition and perception of speech in noise. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 40, 686–693.Google Scholar
Miyake, A., Friedman, N. P., Emerson, M. J., Witzki, A. H., Howerter, A., & Wager, T. D. (2000). The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex “frontal lobe” tasks: A latent variable analysis. Cognitive psychology, 41 (1), 49–100.Google Scholar
Peal, E., & Lambert, W. E. (1962). The relation of bilingualism to intelligence. Psychological Monographs: general and applied, 76 (27), 1–23.Google Scholar
Philipp, A. M., & Koch, I. (2009). Inhibition in language switching: what is inhibited when switching between languages in naming tasks?. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35 (5), 1187.Google Scholar
Prior, A., & MacWhinney, B. (2010). A bilingual advantage in task switching. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13 (2), 253–262.Google Scholar
Raven, J. C., Court, J. H. & Raven, J.(1986) Raven's Progressive Matrices and Raven's Coloured Matrices. London: HK Lewis.Google Scholar
Roberts, P. M., Garcia, L. J., Desrochers, A., Hemandez, D. (2002). English performance of proficient bilingual adults on the Boston Naming Test. Aphasiology, 16, 635–645.Google Scholar
Rogers, C. L., Lister, J. J., Febo, D. M., Besing, J. L., & Abrams, H. B. (2006). Effect of bilingualism, noise, and reverberation on speech perception by listeners with normal hearing. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27, 465–485.Google Scholar
Roland, D., Dick, F., & Elman, J. L. (2007). Frequency of basic English grammatical structures: A corpus analysis. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 348–379.Google Scholar
Shi, L. F. (2010). Perception of acoustically degraded Sentences in bilingual listeners who differ in age of English acquisition. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 53, 821–835.Google Scholar
Snodgrass, J. G., & Vanderwart, M. (1980). A standardized set of 260 pictures: norms for name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. Journal of experimental psychology: Human learning and memory, 6 (2), 174.Google Scholar
Soveri, A., Laine, M., Hämäläinen, H., & Hugdah, K. (2011). Bilingual advantage in attentional control: Evidence from the forced-attention dichotic listening paradigm. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14, 371–378.Google Scholar
Tabri, D., Chacra, K. M. S. A., & Pring, T. (2011). Speech perception in noise by monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual listeners. International Journal of Language Communication Disorders, 46, 411–422.Google Scholar
Van Hell, J. G., & Dijkstra, T. (2002). Foreign language knowledge can influence native language performance in exclusively native contexts. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9 (4), 780–789.Google Scholar
Von Studnitz, R. E., & Green, D. W. (2002). Interlingual homograph interference in German–English bilinguals: Its modulation and locus of control. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5 (01), 1–23.Google Scholar
Wechsler, D. (2008). WAIS-IV Manual. New York: The Psychological Corporation.Google Scholar