The Bilingual Adaptation: How Minds Accommodate Experience
By Ellen Bialystok. Psychological bulletin, 2017
773 citations recorded by the source corpus.
According to some estimates, more than half of the world’s population is multilingual to some extent. Because of the centrality of language use to human experience and the deep connections between linguistic and nonlinguistic processing, it would not be surprising to find that there are interactions between bilingualism and cognitive and brain processes. The present review uses the framework of experience-dependent plasticity to evaluate the evidence for systematic modifications of brain and cognitive systems that can be attributed to bilingualism. The review describes studies investigating the relation between bilingualism and cognition in infants and children, younger and older adults, and patients, using both behavioral and neuroimaging methods. Excluded are studies whose outcomes focus primarily on linguistic abilities because of their more peripheral contribution to the central question regarding experience-dependent changes to cognition. Although most of the research discussed in the review reports some relation between bilingualism and cognitive or brain outcomes, several areas of research, notably behavioral studies with young adults, largely fail to show these effects. These discrepancies are discussed and considered in terms of methodological and conceptual issues. The final section proposes an account based on “executive attention” to explain the range of research findings and to set out an agenda for the next steps in this field.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dee5f4f344d978893d6707fed15eaa08efa22666
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
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- Ali Mazaheri
- Andrea Krott
- Katrien Segaert
- John G. Grundy
- F. H. Lopes da Silva
- Pascal Fries
In Developmental and Educational Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- The effects of bilingualism on executive functions: an updated quantitative analysis (2020, background): “In line with this, several studies have reported that bilinguals are faster and more accurate on behavioral tasks that assess domain-general executive functions (review in Bialystok 2017).”
- Understanding bilingual brain function and structure changes? U bet! A unified bilingual experience trajectory model (2020, background): “Adaptations to language control demands are thus thought to affect non-linguistic control processes (Bialystok, 2017).”