York University, Toronto, Ontario.
York University, Toronto, Ontario.
Brain Cogn. 2021 Feb;147:105658. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2020.105658. Epub 2020 Dec 17.
One approach to resolving the controversy over whether bilingualism affects executive function (EF) performance has been to identify the specific tasks and populations that might show these effects. The assumption is that the effect of bilingualism reliably occurs with some tasks and populations but not others and that identifying those conditions will settle outstanding contradictions. However, it is now clear that experiments using the same task (e.g., flanker, Simon, etc.) and apparently the same populations (monolingual or bilingual participants) still lead to different outcomes. Therefore, something in addition to these factors must determine performance. The present study tested the hypothesis that changes in demands for attentional control within a task is associated with performance differences for groups with different attentional resources, in this case, monolingual and bilingual participants. Sixty-four young adults who were classified as monolingual or bilingual based on a detailed questionnaire completed four increasingly difficult conditions of an n-back task while EEG was recorded. Behavioral results showed greater declines with increasing difficulty for monolinguals than bilinguals, and electrophysiological results revealed more effortful processing by monolinguals across all conditions. Our interpretation is that demands for attentional control by the task in conjunction with assessments of attentional resources in individuals or groups determines performance on executive function tasks. These results lead to a re-examination of how executive function is conceptualized and the role of bilingualism in performance on these tasks.
解决双语是否影响执行功能 (EF) 表现这一争议的一种方法是确定可能显示这些影响的特定任务和人群。假设双语对某些任务和人群的影响是可靠的，但对其他任务和人群则没有影响，并且确定这些条件将解决未解决的矛盾。然而，现在很清楚，即使使用相同的任务（例如，flanker、Simon 等）和显然相同的人群（单语或双语参与者）进行实验，仍然会导致不同的结果。因此，除了这些因素之外，一定还有其他因素决定了表现。本研究检验了一个假设，即在任务中注意力控制需求的变化与具有不同注意力资源的群体（在这种情况下，单语者和双语者）的表现差异有关。64 名年轻成年人根据详细的问卷被分类为单语或双语者，他们在完成 n 次回任务的四个难度递增的条件时记录了脑电图。行为结果表明，单语者的难度增加时表现下降幅度大于双语者，而电生理结果表明，在所有条件下，单语者的处理都需要更多的努力。我们的解释是，任务对注意力控制的需求以及对个体或群体注意力资源的评估决定了执行功能任务的表现。这些结果导致重新审视执行功能的概念化方式以及双语在这些任务中的表现作用。
