Ellen Bialystok, How language experience modifies mind and brain

Summary

In her enlightening presentation, Ellen Bialystok explores how bilingualism affects both cognitive functions and brain structure. The discussion delves into how the language experience modifies the mind and brain, challenging the traditional transfer view with an adaptation view. Bialystok argues that bilingual environments induce adaptations that improve overall attentional efficiencies across the lifespan, rather than merely transferring inhibition skills developed in language contexts to non-verbal tasks. Her insights underscore the broad and dynamic effects of bilingualism on the brain, emphasizing the general enhanced connectivity and efficiency in bilingual individuals.

Highlights

• Ellen Bialystok challenges the traditional view of bilingualism's effect on cognition, suggesting a broader adaptation model. 🎙️🧩
• Bilingual brains show more efficient connectivity, improving cognitive tasks' performance, especially in challenging environments. 🔗🧠
• Research indicates bilingualism holds cognitive benefits throughout life, with effects noticeable from infants to the elderly. 👶🧓
• Bilingual attention systems become more efficient, requiring less mental effort, akin to energy-efficient appliances. ⚡❤️
• The notion of transfer within bilingualism is redefined, emphasizing system-wide adaptation over simple skill transfer. 🔄⚙️

Key Takeaways

• Bilingualism enhances brain efficiency and connectivity, impacting attention and cognitive performance. 🧠✨
• Traditional views on bilingualism focus on transfer of inhibition skills, while new views emphasize adaptation of attention systems. 🔄🗣️
• Through various studies, evidence suggests that bilingual brains are more efficient, requiring less effort for similar cognitive tasks. 📊➕
• Bilingual experience is linked to brain modifications across all ages, indicating continuing cognitive benefits. 🔄👶👵
• Adaptation rather than transfer: bilingual environments shape general cognitive systems, enhancing attentional efficiency. 🔍💡

Overview

Ellen Bialystok's presentation challenges long-held beliefs about bilingualism, proposing that it leads to broader adaptations in cognitive systems rather than just skill transfers. She emphasizes a transformative perspective, suggesting that bilingualism rewires attentional systems to be more efficient, reflecting in overall cognitive performance improvements.

Her extensive discussion covers evidence indicating that bilingual individuals exhibit enhanced brain connectivity and less mental effort in performing tasks. This efficiency emerges from an adaptation of attention systems rather than just transferring specialized inhibition skills.

The talk highlights bilingualism's impact across the lifespan, from infants to older adults, providing cognitive benefits that extend beyond language use into overall brain health and functionality. Bialystok suggests that these findings advocate for a redefined understanding of bilingual cognitive advantages as a result of environmental adaptations rather than simple task-specific transfers.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 03:00: Introduction and Overview The chapter begins with a warm thank you from the speaker, who addresses the audience with gratitude for their attendance, particularly those watching online. The speaker acknowledges the introduction given by Vince, and proceeds with the presentation, mentioning a title slide. Throughout, there is a sense of uncertainty about audience interaction due to the online format, but the speaker maintains a light-hearted tone.
• 03:00 - 06:00: Bilingual Minds and Cognitive Modifications The chapter explores how bilingual minds operate, focusing on the joint activation of multiple languages within the mind. It starts by recounting a historical perspective on bilingual cognition. Key insights include the representation and interaction of languages, as well as the broader cognitive implications of being bilingual. The narrative aims to shed light on the circumstances and occasions that lead to this joint activation of languages.
• 06:00 - 09:00: Standard View of Language Inhibition The chapter titled "Standard View of Language Inhibition" discusses how bilinguals manage to avoid confusion despite the potential for language conflict. It highlights that there is a selection process involved in managing this conflict. The narrative around this process has been established and supported by psycholinguistic evidence for about 40 years.
• 09:00 - 13:00: Problems with the Inhibition Transfer Story This chapter discusses the cognitive modifications associated with bilingual minds. It notes that while positive associations were reported as early as 1962, more consistent and dedicated studies have been conducted since around 1980. These studies focus on comparing monolingual and bilingual individuals in performing non-verbal tasks.
• 13:00 - 16:00: Brain Changes and Bilingualism The chapter explores the relationship between brain changes and bilingualism. The traditional view, which the author admits responsibility for promoting, suggests that these two areas are related and possibly causally linked. The chapter begins with the author reflecting on this standard view and hints at a reconsideration or deeper exploration over the following discussion.
• 16:00 - 19:00: Hypothesis: Bilingualism and General Cognitive Efficiency The chapter explores how the cognitive process used by bilingual individuals to inhibit an unwanted language may transfer to non-linguistic tasks. The idea is that the experience of managing two languages increases general cognitive efficiency, particularly in inhibiting irrelevant information. The chapter discusses the standard view that this inhibition capability, developed through bilingualism, applies to other tasks beyond language, suggesting broader cognitive benefits.
• 19:00 - 29:00: Resting State Connectivity Study This chapter introduces a study on resting-state connectivity with a focus on bilingualism. The researcher begins with an assumed hypothesis, supported by a variety of evidence illustrated in a visual map. This map displays the range of evidence for bilingualism across the lifespan, including behavioral and imaging data delineated by a dotted line. Each section of the map represents different facets of this evidence.
• 29:00 - 34:00: Effortfulness and Endurance in Cognitive Tasks The chapter discusses various tasks used to demonstrate differences between monolinguals and bilinguals, emphasizing the broad range of research methodologies and lifespan coverage in existing studies. The standard view in these cases is addressed, focusing on effortfulness and endurance in cognitive tasks.
• 34:00 - 40:00: Adaptation vs. Transfer in Cognitive Systems This chapter discusses the differences between adaptation and transfer in cognitive systems, specifically focusing on bilinguals and monolinguals. It highlights that bilinguals and monolinguals perform differently on non-verbal tasks. The reason attributed is that the use of language leads to changes in cognition and the brain. More specifically, the inhibition required to manage multiple languages transfers to a greater ability in non-verbal cognitive tasks. This is described as the standard theory or explanation in cognitive studies.
• 40:00 - 49:00: Infants and Older Adults in Bilingual Environments The chapter discusses issues with current findings related to infants and older adults in bilingual environments, highlighting inconsistencies in research results. The analogy to Newton's law emphasizes the need for reliable mechanisms, as opposed to inconsistent findings.
• 49:00 - 58:00: Attention and Cognitive Efficiency The chapter discusses the effects of bilingualism on cognitive development, particularly in preverbal infants. It challenges the notion that language inhibition is necessary for cognitive advancements, as even infants not yet speaking demonstrate improved cognitive performance compared to those raised in monolingual environments.
• 58:00 - 60:00: Conclusion: Experience-Dependent Plasticity The chapter titled 'Conclusion: Experience-Dependent Plasticity' discusses the concept of experience-dependent plasticity and how it impacts various cognitive functions such as memory, perception, and attention, particularly in older adults. It highlights that cognitive reserve in older adults, especially those with dementia, extends beyond simple language inhibition to broader cognitive processes. The chapter is interrupted by an unrelated mention of a ringing phone, suggesting a possible abrupt end to the discussion.

Ellen Bialystok, How language experience modifies mind and brain Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 thank you thank you so much Vince thank you for the nice introduction and now we try to see if any of this works um and thank you all for tuning in um most of you online and I appreciate that I appreciate that you've taken the time so thank you for coming now I'm going to assume you can see my title slide and you can hear me right I have no idea if anybody's saying or doing anything so I'll just keep keep
• 00:30 - 01:00 going yes okay thank you all right so as Vince said I want to talk about why any of this happens so let's start with a very old story what is happening in bilingual Minds well you've got language represented and if you're bilingual you've got a couple of language languages represented they are jointly activated which means there are many occasions for
• 01:00 - 01:30 conflict but bilinguals don't get confused so somehow there's a selection procedure that's a story we've known for about 40 years and every piece of that story has been demonstrated and confirmed with lots of really good psycholinguistic evidence now at the same time there's another story that was actually taking place in
• 01:30 - 02:00 parallel which is that these bilingual Minds were also associated with cognitive modifications now that was first reported in any kind of positive way in 1962 but more consistently since about 1980 or so where people have you know had these dedicated studies looking at monolingual and bilingual Minds performing non-verbal tasks
• 02:00 - 02:30 so those two lines of research have been going on for a long time and are both based on lots of evidence and the question is are they related now for a long time there has been this answer and I have to say here I'm responsible for putting this out there and I'm going to spend the next hour trying to backtrack but the standard view has been yes they are related and in fact they're causally
• 02:30 - 03:00 related because what happens is that this experience in inhibiting The Unwanted target language transfers to other non nonlinguistic situations where you have to inhibit some feature so the standard view is a story in which inhibition transfers to other tasks and and even now most of the
• 03:00 - 03:30 research starts with that assumption that assumed story now there's a lot of evidence and this is a kind of a map that I use to show the range of evidence we have for bilingualism we have the lifespan with these faces we have behavioral and imaging evidence separated by that dotted line and within each of the cells I've just
• 03:30 - 04:00 listed the kinds of tasks people have used to demonstrate differences between monolinguals and bilinguals so there's lots and lots of them and I'm not going to go through them but as you can see they cover the lifespan they cover research methodologies and they use a variety of procedures so the standard view again is that in all of these uh cases where we
• 04:00 - 04:30 see bilinguals and monolinguals Performing differently particularly on non-real tasks the reason is language use leads to cognitive and brain change and in particular inhibition of an unwanted language transfers to inhibition in non-verbal cognition that's the standard story
• 04:30 - 05:00 but there's a problem there's actually several problems first a lot of those results are inconsistent and if it's a mechanism you want it to be more reliable Newton did not say an apple will sometimes fall from a tree he said apples fall from trees so the inconsistent results uh that kind that are tied to that explanation are problematic
• 05:00 - 05:30 but more serious I think are is that we find effects of bilingualism in places that we should not if that transfer of inhibition story is true and no and notably preverbal infants they don't speak they're not inhibiting a language representation and yet they show more advanced performance um from infants raised in monolingual environments on a
• 05:30 - 06:00 variety of tasks memory perception and attention in older age and in particular um older adults with dementia who show cognitive Reserve this cannot be traced to inhibition of a language represent representation it's something far broader and finally the large and growing excuse that ringing phone we're
• 06:00 - 06:30 having an election here the phone rings every five minutes with somebody's campaign um the uh broad range of brain changes found in bilinguals when compared to monolinguals these brain changes cover the entire brain and areas and functions that really can't be traced to language use let alone inhibition of a language so it doesn't really fit so if we go
• 06:30 - 07:00 back to that map that I showed you this is the range of evidence I'm not retracting that but these are the types of evidence that do not fit very well with that standard story where inhibition of a language feature transfers to inhibition of some perceptual feature now I'll put this one in a dotted line because you could explain explain the research with young adults
• 07:00 - 07:30 and conflict tasks in terms of transfer but because the results are so intermittent it's hard to uh accept that as the explanation so let's turn to the brain there the literature on bilingual brains is exploding in really interesting and productive
• 07:30 - 08:00 ways now we know across this range of of research that differences between monolingual and bilingual brains can be found in both white matter and gray matter structure and in functional Activation so a lot I put up this old summary piece that John Grundy um was first author on but there's much more since then so the point here is that the changes are extensive and they're pretty
• 08:00 - 08:30 well anywhere you look you'll find them second and really important I think for the argument is that they're found across the lifespan they're found in infants they're found in children they're found in older adults so this isn't something that's just tied to learning a language or you're or using a language when you're young these changes that seem to correspond to bilingual experience are
• 08:30 - 09:00 found Across the Life lifespan so throughout the brain across the lifespan and for me the best argument of all is they are correlated with the degree of bilingual experience and there's our good friend Vince who um I was very privileged to be part of that study but incredibly Rich data showing that these structural and functional Brain Change
• 09:00 - 09:30 are correlated with degree of bilingual experience it isn't putting people into two groups and saying something is turned on or off this is a dynamic change that is tied to a complex experience and again it affects all of the brain continuously so that's what the brain is telling us how can we use this information from
• 09:30 - 10:00 brain studies to try to understand what's going on in bilingual minds and the hypothesis is this the effect of bilingualism is on General I will explain not specific function so inhibition is very specific the inhibition story is that this very
• 10:00 - 10:30 precise process that we can measure and and monitor that's where the action is and it transfers but the hypothesis here is you've got to forget about homing in on one specific function or process the effect is General all right well General in what sense and what I'm arguing here is that the exposure
• 10:30 - 11:00 at any time in life to two languages or more makes bilingual brains more efficient what does efficient mean and I'm going to Define efficiency as better connectivity with less effortfulness required for similar output
• 11:00 - 11:30 furthermore this efficiency can be seen through changes in attention so you can't see the brain I mean you can I guess see the brain you know pulsing and functioning but the proxy that I'm going to argue tells us how efficient the brain is is measures of attention so we're going to examine how attention is allocated and use that information to
• 11:30 - 12:00 say something about how efficient the brain is so these two aspects of efficiency connectivity and effortfulness I'm going to show you a study that addresses each of them we begin with resting state connectivity so as you know the the brain is not just sitting there waiting
• 12:00 - 12:30 for something to happen it's in a constant state of preparedness in that the regions of the brain are all kind of activated in ways that yield distinct networks so correlated activities between brain regions produces networks the these are not regions of Interest
• 12:30 - 13:00 these networks do not have to be physically um next to each other instead it's correlated activity across the brain that gives rise to these sort of meta networks and I think here about the incredible prean of Donald Hebb um uh cells that fire together wire together so he already had this kind of notion of
• 13:00 - 13:30 he called it a cell assembly but that's really what a network is it's cells that fired together that are then wired together and because the brain is brilliant they don't have to be side by side so you get these correlated um firings that create networks and we know from a lot of research on these networks now that better connectivity Within These Networks and between the networks so you have intra
• 13:30 - 14:00 and intra inter and intra network connectivity better connectivity is associated with better cognitive function not surprising and the converse is that poor connectivity is associated with poor function and disease like Alzheimer's disease so that's what these Network are but the really exciting piece of it is
• 14:00 - 14:30 that these resting state networks can be modified through experience so now they're on the table as something to look at several studies have looked at resting state connectivity in monolinguals and bilinguals using both EEG and MRI and all of the studies that have done this have reported better
• 14:30 - 15:00 connectivity in bilinguals I don't expect you to be able to read all of this but it's just a table that shows a lot of people have tried this with a variety of participants using different kinds of analyses and the results look like they're all over the place but in fact they're all consistent in that in all cases the bilinguals have better connectivity okay so we did a
• 15:00 - 15:30 study um and this is a study that was headed by my colleague Dale Stevens where he took data from 78 older adults who were monolingual or bilingual and matched really carefully so take a second and look at those numbers this is a really well-matched sample and we have lots of data on these people because once you
• 15:30 - 16:00 get them in you sort of throw the book at them so in this study we're looking at um resting state connectivity this this is done in MRI not EEG on well matched monolingual and bilingual older adults are all 74 is years old and they're the same on everything now the results are analyzed in terms of graph Theory analysis which is a means of showing these
• 16:00 - 16:30 correlated networks so you get the you know brain activations at rest they're lying in the scanner but they're not doing anything so their brains are at rest and what you're looking for is patterns of connectivity Studies have done this in the past and as such have identified major networks and the this is several of them here um that have been
• 16:30 - 17:00 studied now what you see under each of the networks is the regions that contribute to those networks and notice that the network doesn't mean that it's in one physical place in the brain it's correlated activity across the brain now the networks that we're going to look at here are these three the default mode Network the frontop parietal control Network and
• 17:00 - 17:30 the dorsal attention Network these are really important networks and they have a very particular connection to each other so this this graph now shows them in a different way it ignores where they are in the brain and it just Scoops out their various nodes or seeds and puts them in a structural relationship so in the center in green is the frontal parietal control
• 17:30 - 18:00 Network it is involved in all cognitive tasks all of them whatever you're doing you are engaging the frontal frontal parietal control Network now the other two the D the uh default mode Network and the dorsal attention Network take turns if one is on the other is off and vice versa so they are are anti-correlated they're not
• 18:00 - 18:30 supposed to be on at the same time but they're always on with the FPC so the FPC is kind of the the conductor that says okay violins it's your turn okay shut up violins it's time for the clarinets and so on so they are anti-correlated and they're not on together now with aging a curious thing happen happens because the default mode Network
• 18:30 - 19:00 starts getting stuck to the FPC it doesn't shut off when it's when it's turn the turn for dorsal attention it keeps playing it drowns out the clarinet because it doesn't stop playing this is normal healthy aging the default mode Network becomes locked or stuck or glued to the
• 19:00 - 19:30 FPC and when that happens you get um a decline in cognitive performance in part because the FPC is so busy trying to deal with the defa mode Network it's less available for the um um for the dorsal attention Network and you get a drop in performance in normal healthy aging okay that's
• 19:30 - 20:00 aging so we did all of these Network analyses for our monolingual and bilingual sample of 74 year olds and here's what we found first there was Stronger connectivity between the default mode Network and the FPC in monolinguals than bilinguals we expect this connectivity with aging the
• 20:00 - 20:30 bilinguals were showing less of it the bilinguals were less stuck the monolinguals have that glued uh default mode Network thing bilinguals less so and the these are the specific nodes that were different and this is a way of just showing the degree of connection so the monolinguals have significantly more connectivity ity between those two
• 20:30 - 21:00 networks and remember the connectivity is not helpful it's normal it's just not helpful but more important Vince will like this one the degree of connectivity was significantly correlated with the degree of bilingualism so the more B lingual they are along the xaxis more
• 21:00 - 21:30 bilingual the less stuck the D the default mode network was to the control Network so what you have is the default mode network is more locked to the control Network in monolinguals than in bilinguals and it is tied to the degree of bilingualism so that's the first point connectivity the second second point is
• 21:30 - 22:00 effortfulness how much energy is required to get to some level of performance and I think about this in terms of a very simple anology everybody can go out and walk you know a 100 meters there's no problem you can all do that some but not all of you can go out and Jog 100
• 22:00 - 22:30 MERS but only a few of you can Sprint 100 meters so if you're just looking at walking you're not going to find any individual differences that are meaningful you have to keep making the task more difficult to find the point at which whatever resources you have are no longer sufficient so this is kind of the effortfulness this
• 22:30 - 23:00 argument now if you have a more efficient resource you can take it further because you need less of it for each level of performance so we're going to measure behavioral and electrophysiological outcomes which is an index of effort for monolingual and bilingual young adults performing a task that is essentially the the same task
• 23:00 - 23:30 but keeps increasing its demands it goes from walking to jogging to running and the hypothesis is that the groups will be similar on the very easy levels but bilinguals will achieve those outcomes with less effort and therefore they'll have more resources to keep going to more difficult
• 23:30 - 24:00 levels and the task is and back this is a task I did with my student Kyle kishen few years ago and what we did is create an endb back task that we could modify for effortfulness so it's the same task 0o one two and three back in zero back the instruction is every time you see a hand or whatever it's obviously counterbalanced press a
• 24:00 - 24:30 button one back is every time you see a stimulus that you just saw in the previous trial press a button it's a bit confusing but it's not terrible two back same instruction but you've got to hold in mind the sequence for two consecutive stimuli and three back which is incredibly difficult you've got to match the current stimulus to one you saw
• 24:30 - 25:00 three trials earlier it's the same task it just gets harder here's our sample again these are young adults and again I think you'll find they're very well matched they're the same on everything except second language ability um so monolingual and bilinguals same age same almost everything um doing this task so the results let's start simply
• 25:00 - 25:30 with the behavioral results so reaction time we can just dismiss right away of course across the conditions they get slower but there's absolutely no difference and what I find interesting here is that they're always really quite fast even in the very very difficult three back they're making decisions pretty quickly reaction time of course is only to Accurate responses to correct
• 25:30 - 26:00 responses so they're doing the task really well and they're doing it quickly that also tells me that reaction time isn't really giving us useful information now accuracy not surprisingly really drops off and the blue lines are bilinguals the red lines are monolinguals everybody finds the subsequent conditions to be more difficult but the drop off for the
• 26:00 - 26:30 monolinguals is more uh it's significant it's significantly steeper um but you can see that the task manipulation is having its effect now for electrophysiology what we're interested in is posterior p3s and the message here is that a nice big positive P3
• 26:30 - 27:00 waveform is an index of easy processing for which effortful intervention is not required so the larger the P3 the more smooth and and high the P3 goes the less effort that's recruited to perform the condition to perform the task all right so here's the
• 27:00 - 27:30 results I'll take you through it's a I put everything on one graph so the comparisons are easy but I know it makes the graph messy so I've put a box around where the P3 is and it's actually just goes a little past 400 milliseconds this is the amplitude of the P3 so remember a larger amplitude ude means um a more automatic processing
• 27:30 - 28:00 easier time and there's two things to notice about these graphs the first is that the blue lines are bilingual and the red lines are monolingual and the blue lines are always higher than the red lines in every single case blue lines are always higher so whatever is happening and for whatever level of accuracy you're talking about the bilinguals are doing
• 28:00 - 28:30 it with less effort and the other thing to notice is now I'm sure you can't see this clearly but I've used different kinds of dotting to show the conditions so just take my word for it that the conditions 012 and three follow in exactly the predicted sequence of um of difficulty so the this is um list the series that goes from 01
• 28:30 - 29:00 to 3 within each language group is always in the correct order and monolinguals are always requiring more effort than bilinguals even when their accuracy is the same the largest difference though is on the most difficult condition so this is the three back where everybody's doing more poorly and even here I've indicated
• 29:00 - 29:30 the diff the difference in effort required for the bilinguals and the monolinguals so what can we say about efficiency what I've shown here is that bilingual brains have better resting state connectivity than monolinguals so maybe that means they're more prepared to respond Behavior Al in the endb back
• 29:30 - 30:00 bilinguals outperform monolinguals as the task became more difficult so they are more endurance and in the electrophysiology we saw that bilinguals are using less effort to achieve to achieve the same level so I this is like more fit you can do more with less you don't need all that extra energy it's a it's like the um energy efficient Appliance es in your kitchen they'll
• 30:00 - 30:30 still keep your food cold and they will use less energy so that's what an efficient brain does it can achieve the same level it can do the task with less energy so the interpretation that I want to make is that bilingual experience makes attention systems more efficient okay how does it do that that and here's where I'm going to argue that
• 30:30 - 31:00 bilingual environments lead to an adaptation in brain networks what does that mean so let's start by looking at the standard story The Standard view is that bilingual language processing or a particular aspect of
• 31:00 - 31:30 bilingual language processing transfers to non-verbal tasks so you have a skill this is what transfer means a skill developed in one context turns out to be really useful for a completely different context so it's applied it's transferred it's the same skill that's built up in one cont context and then it's
• 31:30 - 32:00 reused repurposed for a different context and in this case we're talking about the inhibition of language is repurposed so it can inhibit a feature in things like a streo Simon or flanker task that's the standard view the altern the alternate view is that bilingual experience on its own you're in this big soup of bilingual
• 32:00 - 32:30 experience and it's not going to lead to some specific thing that you use here and then use there but the entire attention system is adapted to deal with this complex environment so we have bilingual experience in which there are a whole bunch of processes that are immersed in that
• 32:30 - 33:00 experience and because there's an adaptation from exper from that experience the bilingual experience changes that process and then everything that process has to do is modify and so let's say that process is attention selective attention now just to think about this another way we know that correlation is not
• 33:00 - 33:30 causation but that's kind of the mistake that the transfer view is making we know there's a correlation between these things but is it causation correlation doesn't answer that question because correlation is sometimes explained by an underlying third factor and the adaptation view is more aligned with the underlying third factors so just being in a bilingual envir environment changes the system so that
• 33:30 - 34:00 everything that system does is modified now adaptation um is a common explanation for changes in many biological systems so just to pick up a few here blood hemoglobin adapt to oxygen I just read an article recently about a study
• 34:00 - 34:30 conducted on people who live in extreme high altitudes in the Andes looking at how they survive basically um in terms of what changes have been made to their blood hemoglobin so that they can extract adequate oxygen from an extremely low oxygen environment so that that's what you know the the the respiratory system just
• 34:30 - 35:00 makes that adaptation the nature of hemoglobin changes so that oxygen intake um becomes more suited to that environment melanin adapts to the sun this we know this uh sometimes for good sometimes not for good um if you don't have enough melanin then you're susceptible to sun damage um and so on the cardio vascular system adapts to
• 35:00 - 35:30 exercise by training really hard in one aerobic activity you're better prepared to do another aerobic activity not because you've transferred anything about that activity but because the underlying system is available in both activities and so both are changed so the adaptations that I'm talking about lead to underlying changes
• 35:30 - 36:00 in general systems that have multiple responsibilities it's not an A2B transfer thing and when these underlying systems change that system is better to deal with particular environments and so bilingual environments are very interesting they are linguistically complex they require constant monitoring they require new ways of of attending to
• 36:00 - 36:30 the language in the environment because they impose a whole new layer of variability so bilingual environments are linguistically complex and my argument is that the attention system adapts to the demands of those environments so here's another cartoon way of thinking about
• 36:30 - 37:00 it here's a bilingual environment into which you put some cognitive system so a cognitive system has an attention ability that's responsible for a whole range of things attention underlies lots and lots of things and if you change attention there for by definition you're going to change
• 37:00 - 37:30 the performance on all four of these skills and my argument is that this attention itself is changed because it's in this bilingual soup so we're not changing these four skills we're changing underlying attention however we now know and this is because of some of you out there who've done such important work on this bilingual
• 37:30 - 38:00 environments are not the same and we're beginning thanks to much of your research to understand what the important differences are between bilingual environments so in this story if the bilingual environment is modifying attention which then is reflected in all these skills different different particular bilingual
• 38:00 - 38:30 environments will adapt attention in slightly different ways here's a different bilingual environment and we need to specify these differences and this is one of the really important contributions of the Adaptive control hypothesis where they set out very specific differences in how language is used and tie them to differences in how these
• 38:30 - 39:00 brain networks might adapt to those different aspects so the mechanism is the same something is being modified because it's dealing with a bilingual environment but the level of detail takes it to the next step what are the differences in different bilingual environments and how are they manifest in the adaptations and if you take yet another bilingual
• 39:00 - 39:30 environment we can see that all of these changes in the specific nature of the in the bilingual environment change the way the adaptation takes place it's still an adaptation we're still talking about modifying and underlying resource and then trying to measure the impact of that modification across observable
• 39:30 - 40:00 tasks but we are not ever trying to connect these specific skills with each other because the whole mechanism is just too broad for that so let's go back to the map of the bilingual results I said that the ones in these solid red lines really did not fit well with a transfer
• 40:00 - 40:30 view there's a lot of reasons for that but a lot but I think an important one is that the transfer view comes down to the need to say very specifically what particular skill transfers to what other skill and the way that has been fleshed out in the bilingualism research is inhibition of a language or a language feature uh the ability to inhibit a language or language feature or lexical entry transfers to the ability to
• 40:30 - 41:00 inhibit um a perceptual feature and I said these kinds of evidence for bilingual monolingual differences don't fit with that story so let's look then at infants I already mentioned that infants aren't speaking so they're not inhibiting anything but what are they doing and this the infant research is incredibly
• 41:00 - 41:30 interesting infants can discriminate between two languages in their environment from at least six months on this is very preverbal but we know that they perceive two different languages they can even do it when they're watching um soundless videos of somebody speaking one language and then switching to the other they know when the language
• 41:30 - 42:00 switch happens even without sound so they're discriminating languages in their environment in a way that monolingual infants obviously don't need to they can monitor their environment and keep track of language so even before they start using language they're responding to a more complex a complex linguistic envir environment and this
• 42:00 - 42:30 complexity is handled by attention so the kinds of differences we see between infants in monolingual and bilingual environments are shown with how they respond to visual language how they scan faces for information about language how they perform simple visual attention tasks and then there's other examples as well all of these are attain ition tasks where they need to know where to look and within the first year infants
• 42:30 - 43:00 who are being raised in a bilingual environment are better than monolingual infants knowing where to look where to look for the important information that's attention that's all it is it's not language ability it's attention what about older adults and particularly older adults uh with d it's hard to say that a lifetime of
• 43:00 - 43:30 inhibiting sh when you meant to say dog is going to be responsible for the really substantial cognitive Reserve that we find in older adults but it could be explained by saying that a lifetime of having a more efficient brain defined in the ways I showed you in those two studies means that at end of life in
• 43:30 - 44:00 older age even with neurodegenerative disease you still need fewer resources to do the same task because the brain is more generally efficient and so you can plug along longer that would be the cognitive Reserve argument so they can cope with system with with declining cognition even with uh neurodegenerative disease because the brain needs less
• 44:00 - 44:30 fuel less energy it's a more efficient brain and it got that way because it has spent a lifetime adapting to a complex bilingual environment and finally the um uh the the brain Imaging results um these are interesting because there was an argument some time ago that
• 44:30 - 45:00 some argued that if behavioral results are the same then don't even look at the brain because there's nothing to see here this argument was uh put out uh around the time people were beginning to report with with with in a large number of studies reporting young adults doing standard executive functioning tasks had similar behavioral outcomes
• 45:00 - 45:30 there's other reasons for that but that's not what I'm going to be talking about and so they'd say why are you even looking at Erp and fmri the results are the same nothing to see here but I think that's backwards because it's only when the behavioral results are exactly the same you can really understand all the brain differences that have been
• 45:30 - 46:00 found and as I said everywhere you look there are brain differences so again the idea here is that this constant experience in a bilingual environment is modifying attention systems and that may or may not show up in behavioral results it just depends if you're being asked to walk or jog or run but those systems are changing and the real payoff comes in
• 46:00 - 46:30 older age when the pressures on the system increase and possibly uh even enter into neuropathology so the adaptation view has no problem with these kinds of results now I've been saying it's attention and I also admitted earlier I'm just going to call it attention
• 46:30 - 47:00 but there is one study that I find very compelling that actually asked this question so it turns out that if you use EX gaussian analyses on behavioral data you can distinguish between inhibition and attention and I'm going to tell you right now I'm going to show you the results do not ask me about them
• 47:00 - 47:30 I understand nothing about the method and it's just the result okay so I trust people who know how to do this so excal and analyses look at the tals of the distributions not just the mean scores which is what our parametric analyses are obsessed with but if you look at the tals you get a different kind of information so zuu and crot looked at
• 47:30 - 48:00 about 50 monolingual and 50 bilingual young adults good sample size and they did stoop flanker and Simon tasks and there was no RT difference if you look at parametric analyses of mean RTS no difference we've seen this a lot in the literature but they did didn't stop there they did these analyses of the
• 48:00 - 48:30 Tails so it turns out that inhibition shows up as a larger new function and again I do not know how these things are calculated but I'm going to show you the data anyway so that means that if you comparing congruent and in congruent trials you should have a larger Mew on in congruent trials because there's some
• 48:30 - 49:00 kind of inhibition happening there right here are the results so flanker uh um uh flanker uh um sto and Simon these are the me scores for flanker stoop and Simon monolinguals are filled bilingual Wes are uh empty and the
• 49:00 - 49:30 congruent congruent is the first pair of bars in congruent is the second pair of bars so if you go through this carefully you'll see for each task the pair of bars reporting Mew for the incongruent trials are always substantially higher than those for the Congress ruined and when you compare monolinguals
• 49:30 - 50:00 and bilinguals there's absolutely no difference so if you're just looking at inhibition you have a congruency effect there is no language group effect now attention they argue is indicated through to and specifically to is smaller when when a goal is maintained when attention is better it's focused
• 50:00 - 50:30 then tow is reduced less effort okay so a smaller tow shows less effort so here are the results again flanker Stroop Simon monolinguals solid bars bilingual empty bars and again congruent in congruent and now there's very little going on between congruent and in congruent
• 50:30 - 51:00 trials but look at monolingual and bilingual differences in every single comparison the monolinguals are requiring far more effort than the bilinguals so the bilinguals have better goal maintenance better attention so let's again look at these two concepts adaptation of attention
• 51:00 - 51:30 versus transfer of inhibition they sound very similar but I'm arguing that do not be misled by the by how they sound similar so if we look at a graph in which we have four different tasks or four conditions we can describe the tasks in terms of their degree of attention this is like the endb back I showed you that
• 51:30 - 52:00 we can go from zero to three on essentially the same task difficulty or we can describe them in terms of degree of similarity this is what the most of the literature does stoop Stroop uh Simon and flanker they're all kind of similar we expect the same results in fact this has been argued that um the results for Stroop s and flanker must be similar for the
• 52:00 - 52:30 bilingualism story to hold up now if transfer is based on similarity if transfer is based on similarity then we expect differences I think I've just done this slide incorrectly I'm going to put up the next right transfer is based on similarity um then the same task the same task
• 52:30 - 53:00 should have more or less the same outcome so an easy version of Stroop should be the same as a harder version of the Stroop because it's all about transferring that process you need to perform the Stroop task instead if the similarity is based on adapt if the performance is based on adaptation then what we should find is difficulty
• 53:00 - 53:30 is determining what's similar so two hard problems should be more similar than an easy problem and a hard problem because it's about how many resources are available not what specific process has transferred so let's go back to the beginning what happens in bilingual Minds so we had this process that we know is
• 53:30 - 54:00 going on whereby bilinguals are constantly dealing with the joint activation of two language systems and there are implications of that uh that system at the same time there are modifications in cognitive behavior that are attributable to whatever is going on in bilingual mind are they
• 54:00 - 54:30 related well I'm going to say yes but not directly both are affected by more efficient attention there is no transfer I want to insert one other comment here I've been told that I'm not saying anything different because isn't this all just transfer and it's not and I'm trying to
• 54:30 - 55:00 say something very different from transfer and the reason it seems easy to say that is because the word transfer has two kinds of meanings it has the very specific meaning used in cognitive psychology and in the bilingualism literature in which some process is repurposed to use in a new context
• 55:00 - 55:30 but it's the same process and so if it's been built up it can be applied to a new context but transfer in general use means overlap and if you take the broad nontechnical meaning of overlap and of course everything is transfer there's no limits on what couldn't be
• 55:30 - 56:00 described as transfer because everything overlaps in some way so in the adaptation view that I'm arguing here there's a lot of overlap between these systems there's overlap between the attention system and what it does to language processing and stre performance but there's no transfer because in the technal view of transfer you have to be able to trace precisely a movement a process a in
• 56:00 - 56:30 context one to context two transfer in the most General meaning just means there's some similarity here so we can't be misled by the non-specific General use of language this is not transfer it's a mechanism that goes outside of that domain and looks at how broadscale
• 56:30 - 57:00 systems respond to environments and it's it is used I have just finished reading a tremendously interesting book by Maran wolf which I strongly recommend she has two books that are both terrific on how the reading mind adapts to reading and she argues that both historic ly since samarians first interacted with print and onto
• 57:00 - 57:30 genetically as children learn to read their brains adapt to the very particular and bizarre needs of reading and in so doing those brains change and her argument is that brains are incredibly plastic and respond to experience this is just another example of that so my conclusions are that exposure to a complex linguistic
• 57:30 - 58:00 environment just the exposure leads to attentional changes across the lifespan and across systems there is no specific connection between a specific task or process and some particular outcome and experience in bilingual environments this is my story now leads
• 58:00 - 58:30 to an adaptation in an underlying resource that is essential to all of human cognition this is what we mean by experience dependent plasticity thank you