This course explores the brain bases of bilingualism by discussing literature relevant to differences in age of initial learning, proficiency, and control in the nonverbal, single language and dual-language literature. Participants will learn about the latest research related to how humans learn one or two languages and other cognitive skills.
7.3 The Bilingual Advantage
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來自 University of Houston System 的課程
The Bilingual Brain
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從本節課中
Week 7
與講師見面
Arturo E. HernandezProfessor
Psychology
[SOUND] The idea
that there might be a bilingual advantage, that there might be
a difference in the way bilinguals process information, was somewhat controversial.
I remember, in my second year of graduate school,
walking along with another graduate student in my program.
And, her question was somewhat surprising.
She told me and she asked me.
As we were walking.
It is true that bilinguals are less intelligent than monolinguals?
And I kind of stopped and
gave her the specific answer that I'd learned as an undergrad.
Well, in fact the finding is that perhaps bilinguals outperform monolinguals
on intelligence tests.
But what I didn't notice is whether she was wondering and asking whether I
was less intelligent than her, since she was monolingual and I was bilingual.
And if we add another language are we even less intelligent?
And if you add four or five does that even reduce intelligence more?
So this area of thinking about intelligence and
bilingualism was controversial and there have been studies in the past suggesting
that bilinguals were less intelligent.
But then subsequent studies that controlled for
level of education found that, in fact, bilinguals outperform monolinguals.
There was another finding that was interesting, which was that
children who were bilingual seemed to have more flexibility in the use of symbols.
So, for example, all kids at some point realize that you could call the moon
spaghetti, and that wasn't a problem, to say that the moon is spaghetti and
that spaghetti is the moon.
All children at some age are willing to realize that they can substitute one noun
for another, so if you ask someone as a ten year old.
Can you call the moon spaghetti?
They'd say sure we can call the moon spaghetti, and
then I can go up there, fly in my spaceship, and eat the moon for lunch.
Right.
They can imagine that.
It's somewhat comical.
But young children are much less flexible, and much less likely to say,
yeah, I can call the moon spaghetti.
No, the moon is called the moon.
Now it turns out that bilingual children are willing to do that much younger.
And that's of course because they have two labels for the same item.
They learn very young that in fact
they can use two different words for the same item.
And when someone asks them well can you call the moon spaghetti?
Sure I can call it spaghetti.
Why? Because I already have two labels for
it so I know that there could be another label.
The label itself does not represent the object.
It's a label.
And bilingual children know this earlier because they have two.
So they're able to dissociate between the label and the item at an earlier age.
Now Ellen Bialystok now in very well set of
published studies has looked at this effect.
One initial study looked at dimensional card sort.
Dimensional card sort is the idea that you have a set of cards with shapes,
and that you have to sort them, depending on what the shape is.
Dimensional card sort is a task in which you has, get a set of cards with shapes
that are colored, and you're asked to sort them either by shape or by color.
Now children are asked first to sort them by shape.
Then the col, the cards are mixed up, and they're asked to sort by color.
And of course what happens is that this creates interference.
It's difficult to sort on one dimension and then later sort on another.
Bialystok figured out from her data that both monolingual and
bilingual children could represent a motor response that was different.
They understood the rules that one was color and shape.
But their problem was with the concept.
The concept of switching from one idea to another.
That was what's, was difficult for the monolingual children and
easier for the bilingual children.
And her interpretation was that because bilinguals have two different labels.
Or sets of labels for each set of items in the world that they're able to
shift from one set of items to the other more easily.
That the shifting that occurs across languages leads to
an advantage in shifting across concepts.
Hanako Yoshida and colleagues at the University of
Houston have also looked at similar types of effects, and
found that in fact, when you present these different types of control tasks.
In their case they used what's called the hungry fish game.
The hungry fish game is a adapted from what's called a flanker task.
A flanker task, people have a set of arrows.
They're asked to respond to the middle arrow.
And the middle arrow can be pointing to the same direction as the other arrows or
in the opposite direction of the surrounding arrow.
And people are slower when the ar, when this middle arrow points in
the opposite direction as the surrounding arrows.
Now, of course, the difficulty with children is,
well what the heck are they going to do, how are you going to adapt this?
And so, and colleagues actually adapted this task into what's called
The Hungry Fish Game, in which children are asked to feed the hungry fish.
Now the hungry fish happens to be in the middle and the mouth of the hungry fish is
either pointing in the same direction as all the other surrounding fish or
the other surrounding fish are in the opposite direction.
And there's a slow down.
When this hungry fish is in the opposite direction, children are slower.
Interestingly, bilingual children seem to show an advantage on this task,
when they're young.
The advantage disappears, but it's there at a young age,
suggesting that bilinguals somehow have an advantage on these types of tasks.
