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A bilingual advantage in controlling language interference during sentence comprehension*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2012

ROBERTO FILIPPI ,
ROBERT LEECH ,
MICHAEL S. C. THOMAS ,
DAVID W. GREEN  and
FREDERIC DICK
ROBERTO FILIPPI*
Affiliation:
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge & Birkbeck, University of London
ROBERT LEECH
Affiliation:
Imperial College London & Hammersmith Hospital, London
MICHAEL S. C. THOMAS
Affiliation:
Birkbeck, University of London
DAVID W. GREEN
Affiliation:
University College London
FREDERIC DICK
Affiliation:
Birkbeck, University of London
*
Address for correspondence: Roberto Filippi, Anglia Ruskin University, Faculty of Science & Technology, Department of Psychology, East Road, Cambridge CB2 1PT, UKroberto.filippi@anglia.ac.uk
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Abstract

This study compared the comprehension of syntactically simple with more complex sentences in Italian–English adult bilinguals and monolingual controls in the presence or absence of sentence-level interference. The task was to identify the agent of the sentence and we primarily examined the accuracy of response. The target sentence was signalled by the gender of the speaker, either a male or a female, and this varied over trials, where the target was spoken in a male voice the distractor was spoken in a female voice and vice versa. In contrast to other work showing a bilingual disadvantage in sentence comprehension under conditions of noise, we show that in this task, where voice permits selection of the target, adult bilingual speakers are in fact better able than their monolingual Italian peers to resist sentence-level interference when comprehension demands are high. Within bilingual speakers we also found that degree of proficiency in English correlated with the ability to resist interference for complex sentences both when the target and distractor were in Italian and when the target was in English and the distractor in Italian.

Keywords

bilingualisminhibitionexecutive functionsentence interpretationcontrol of interference
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , October 2012 , pp. 858 - 872
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

This study was funded by the UK ESRC grant RES-062-23-2721. Our thanks to Francesca Antichi for her assistance.

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