Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Bilingualism is prevalent in many societies and proficient bilinguals can use both languages daily and even within the same discourse or sentence. How do bilinguals accomplish this amazing task? Some have suggested that bilinguals have two monolingual brains in the same head, but research examining bilingual processing has shown that this is not an accurate characterization. Though bilingual language use seems effortless, we know that managing multiple languages impacts language specific executive functions.Precisely how executive functions and bilingualism interact, which factors of bilingualism affect this interaction, and what the exact underlying neural processes are, remains unclear. Much of the literature on bilingualism and executive functions focuses on whether there is a cognitive advantage to bilingualism; the line of research proposed here looks instead at which aspects of bilingualism (e.g., early acquisition, codeswitching habits, naturalistic exposure) might impact executive functioning. This will be achieved by comparing different types of bilinguals to one another, rather than classically comparing bilinguals to monolinguals. Under this design, bilingualism is treated in the same way as musical training (Criscuolo et al., 2019), physical activity (Berryman et al., 2018) and many other cognitive skills (i.e., it is treated as one of many potential sources of cognitive enrichment (Valian, 2015)). One of the major challenges of investigating the cognitive consequences of bilingualism is that there are many ways in which bilinguals acquire and use their languages. For instance, two people who speak the same two languages may still differ with respect to their language background. They may have learned language in different ways (one learned it at home, the other learned it in school). They may also use language differently (one uses their second language only at work, while another used it both at work and at home). These different daily experiences can affect how language and general executive functions are represented at a neurophysiological level. The research proposed here will make use of a neurophysiological measure that has excellent temporal resolution (i.e., electroencephalography). By monitoring bilinguals' brain activity, we will be able to probe the recruitment and operation of their executive functioning abilities, and examine how these may be affected by their individual language experiences. Over the next 5 years, I will focus on young adults and investigate how individual differences in language experience impact both domain general and language specific executive functioning. My results will have a positive impact on how bilingualism is viewed and will provide an explanation of how bilingualism may provide a buffer against cognitive decline in aging and in the extent of lasting damage from brain injuries (e.g., Voits et al., 2022).