| Poster | Poster Session 11 Program Schedule
02/17/2024
10:45 am - 12:00 pm
Room: Shubert Complex (Posters 1-60)
Poster Session 11: Cultural Neuropsychology | Education/Training | Professional Practice Issues
Final Abstract #13
The "Bilingual Hypothesis" and Executive Function in College-Aged Individuals: Time to Consider the Role of Acculturation?
Shelby Allan, Washington State University, Pullman, United States
Tammy Barry, Washington State University, Pullman, United States
Category: Cross Cultural Neuropsychology/ Clinical Cultural Neuroscience
Keyword 1: bilingualism/multilingualism
Keyword 2: acculturation
Keyword 3: executive functions
Objective:
Research has shown that bilingual individuals may have an advantage pertaining to tasks of executive functioning (EF) due to greater mental flexibility and inhibition of non-relevant stimuli (the “Bilingual Hypothesis”). However, evidence supporting this hypothesis is varied, with some studies not finding any impact of bilingualism on EF. Further, when the advantage is seen, the extent of this advantage is unknown especially related to how often additional language(s) is used, the level of language fluency in one or more languages, and, if any, when additional languages were learned. The current study aimed to understand the relation between language fluency and EF among monolingual and bi/multilingual individuals, how language usage frequency may relate to EF, and the importance of age of acquisition of language.
Participants and Methods:
Participants were 88 undergraduate students between the ages of 18 and 41 (M = 20.14, SD = 3.56), who identified as either monolingual (n = 31) or bi/multilingual (n = 57). Participants completed a demographic questionnaire, the Adapted Bidimensional Acculturation Scale (A-BAS), the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task, the Color Word Stroop, and the Visual Digit Span Test.
Results:
Among the variables of interest, significant correlations were found among language variables (e.g., language fluency and language application, r = .96, p < .01) and among EF variables (e.g., total EF and working memory, r = .66, p < .01). However, no significant relations between language variables and EF variables were found for the full sample (with positive correlations ranging from r = .01, p = .94 to r = .12, p = .46). Inhibition was counterintuitively negatively correlated with all three language variables, the only significant one being with language acquisition, r = -.23, p = .04. Further, age of acquisition did not predict EF among the bi/multilingual group (Total EF r = -.05, p = .73), nor did it moderate the relation of other language variables with EF. For all eight moderated multiple regressions, none of the steps were significant. The non-significant interactions between language acquisition and the other language variables accounted for only 4% of unique variance at most.
Conclusions:
In the current study, neither higher levels of language fluency nor higher instances of language application were related to better EF performance, which represents a lack of evidence for the Bilingual Hypothesis. The counterintuitive negative correlation between inhibition and language acquisition in the full sample is of interest, suggesting that learning more languages at an earlier age is correlated with poorer inhibition performance. However, this may be related to orthographic features of languages and/or impacts of balanced versus unbalanced bilingualism. Though some studies suggest the potential explanation that advantages of bilingualism may not present themselves until older adulthood, emerging evidence and research suggest that acculturation, rather than bilingualism, could be the driving force behind the studies that find support for the Bilingual Hypothesis. Future research may focus on the larger impacts of acculturation, rather than bilingualism, on EF.
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