Marsh John E, Hansson Patrik, Sörman Daniel Eriksson, Ljungberg Jessica Körning
Department of Environmental Psychology, University of Gävle, Gävle, Sweden.
School of Psychology, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, United Kingdom.
Front Psychol. 2019 Jun 12;10:1355. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01355. eCollection 2019.
Bilinguals often show a disadvantage in lexical access on verbal fluency tasks wherein the criteria require the production of words from semantic categories. However, the pattern is more heterogeneous for letter (phonemic) fluency wherein the task is to produce words beginning with a given letter. Here, bilinguals often outperform monolinguals. One explanation for this is that phonemic fluency, as compared with semantic fluency, is more greatly underpinned by executive processes and that bilinguals exhibit better performance on phonemic fluency due to better executive functions. In this study, we re-analyzed phonemic fluency data from the Betula study, scoring outputs according to two measures that purportedly reflect executive processes: clustering and switching. Consistent with the notion that bilinguals have superior executive processes and that these can be used to offset a bilingual disadvantage in verbal fluency, bilinguals (35-65 years at baseline) demonstrated greater switching and clustering throughout the 15-year study period.
双语者在言语流畅性任务的词汇提取方面往往处于劣势，这类任务的标准要求从语义类别中生成单词。然而，在字母（音素）流畅性任务中，模式则更为多样，该任务是要生成以给定字母开头的单词。在这方面，双语者的表现往往优于单语者。对此的一种解释是，与语义流畅性相比，音素流畅性在更大程度上受执行过程的支撑，并且由于双语者具有更好的执行功能，所以他们在音素流畅性方面表现更佳。在本研究中，我们重新分析了来自桦树研究的音素流畅性数据，根据两种据称反映执行过程的指标对输出结果进行评分：聚类和转换。与双语者具有卓越的执行过程且这些过程可用于弥补双语者在言语流畅性方面的劣势这一观点一致，双语者（基线年龄为35 - 65岁）在整个15年的研究期间表现出更强的转换和聚类能力。
