Kim Yeonwoo, Ye Zixuan, Leventhal Zachary, Wang Wei-Ju, Thiessen Erik D
Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, United States.
Department of Statistics and Data Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, United States.
Front Psychol. 2023 Jan 5;13:923123. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.923123. eCollection 2022.
The relation between linguistic experience and cognitive function has been of great interest, but recent investigations of this question have produced widely disparate results, ranging from proposals for a "bilingual advantage," to a "bilingual disadvantage," to claims of no difference at all as a function of language. There are many possible sources for this lack of consensus, including the heterogeneity of bilingual populations, and the choice of different tasks and implementations across labs. We propose that another reason for this inconsistency is the task demands of transferring from linguistic experience to laboratory tasks can differ greatly as the task is modified. In this study, we show that task modality (visual, audio, and orthographic) can yield different patterns of performance between monolingual and multilingual participants. The very same task can show similarities or differences in performance, as a function of modality. In turn, this may be explained by the distance of transfer - how close (or far) the laboratory task is to the day to day lived experience of language usage. We suggest that embodiment may provide a useful framework for thinking about task transfer by helping to define the processes of linguistic production and comprehension in ways that are easily connected to task manipulations.
语言经验与认知功能之间的关系一直备受关注，但最近对这个问题的研究结果却大相径庭，从提出“双语优势”，到“双语劣势”，再到声称语言并无差异。缺乏共识可能有多种原因，包括双语人群的异质性，以及不同实验室在任务选择和实施上的差异。我们认为，这种不一致的另一个原因是，随着任务的改变，从语言经验转换到实验室任务的要求可能会有很大不同。在本研究中，我们表明任务模态（视觉、听觉和正字法）会在单语和多语参与者之间产生不同的表现模式。同样的任务，根据模态的不同，其表现可能会相似或不同。反过来，这可以用转换距离来解释——实验室任务与日常语言使用体验的接近程度（或遥远程度）。我们认为，具身认知可以提供一个有用的框架，通过以易于与任务操作相联系的方式定义语言产生和理解的过程，来思考任务转换。
