Vega-Mendoza Mariana, West Holly, Sorace Antonella, Bak Thomas H
The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Cognition. 2015 Apr;137:40-46. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.12.008. Epub 2015 Jan 14.
We present a study examining cognitive functions in late non-balanced bilinguals with different levels of second language proficiency. We examined in two experiments a total of 193 mono- and bilingual university students. We assessed different aspects of attention (sustained, selective and attentional switching), verbal fluency (letter and category) as well as picture-word association as a measure of language proficiency. In Experiment 2 we also compared students in their first/initial (Y1) and fourth/final (Y4) year of either language or literature studies. There were no differences between both groups in category fluency. In selective attention, bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in Y1 and this difference remained significant in Y4 despite overall improvement in both groups. Contrasting results were found in attentional switching and letter fluency: while no differences were found in Y1 in both tasks, in Y4 there was an advantage for bilinguals in attentional switching and for monolinguals in letter fluency. We conclude that overall late-acquisition non-balanced bilinguals experience similar cognitive effects as their early-acquisition balanced counterparts. However, different cognitive effects may appear at different stages of adult second language acquisition.
我们展示了一项针对不同第二语言熟练程度的晚期非平衡双语者认知功能的研究。我们在两个实验中对总共193名单语和双语大学生进行了研究。我们评估了注意力的不同方面（持续注意力、选择性注意力和注意力转换）、语言流畅性（字母和类别）以及作为语言熟练程度衡量指标的图片-单词联想。在实验2中，我们还比较了语言或文学专业一年级（Y1）和四年级（Y4）的学生。两组在类别流畅性方面没有差异。在选择性注意力方面，双语者在Y1的表现优于单语者，尽管两组总体上都有所提高，但这种差异在Y4仍然显著。在注意力转换和字母流畅性方面发现了相反的结果：虽然在这两项任务中Y1没有发现差异，但在Y4中，双语者在注意力转换方面有优势，而单语者在字母流畅性方面有优势。我们得出结论，总体而言，晚期习得的非平衡双语者与早期习得的平衡双语者经历相似的认知效应。然而，不同的认知效应可能出现在成人第二语言习得的不同阶段。
