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Moving From Bilingual Traits to States: Understanding Cognition and Language Processing Through Moment-to-Moment Variation

The study of how bilingualism is linked to cognitive processing, including executive functioning, has historically focused on comparing bilinguals to monolinguals across a range of tasks. These group comparisons presume to capture relatively stable cognitive traits and have revealed important insigh...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Salig, Lauren K., Valdés Kroff, Jorge R., Slevc, L. Robert, Novick, Jared M.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MIT Press 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10158593/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37214629
http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00046
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author Salig, Lauren K.
Valdés Kroff, Jorge R.
Slevc, L. Robert
Novick, Jared M.
author_facet Salig, Lauren K.
Valdés Kroff, Jorge R.
Slevc, L. Robert
Novick, Jared M.
author_sort Salig, Lauren K.
collection PubMed
description The study of how bilingualism is linked to cognitive processing, including executive functioning, has historically focused on comparing bilinguals to monolinguals across a range of tasks. These group comparisons presume to capture relatively stable cognitive traits and have revealed important insights about the architecture of the language processing system that could not have been gleaned from studying monolinguals alone. However, there are drawbacks to using a group-comparison, or Traits, approach. In this theoretical review, we outline some limitations of treating executive functions as stable traits and of treating bilinguals as a uniform group when compared to monolinguals. To build on what we have learned from group comparisons, we advocate for an emerging complementary approach to the question of cognition and bilingualism. Using an approach that compares bilinguals to themselves under different linguistic or cognitive contexts allows researchers to ask questions about how language and cognitive processes interact based on dynamically fluctuating cognitive and neural states. A States approach, which has already been used by bilingualism researchers, allows for cause-and-effect hypotheses and shifts our focus from questions of group differences to questions of how varied linguistic environments influence cognitive operations in the moment and how fluctuations in cognitive engagement impact language processing.
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spelling pubmed-101585932023-05-19 Moving From Bilingual Traits to States: Understanding Cognition and Language Processing Through Moment-to-Moment Variation Salig, Lauren K. Valdés Kroff, Jorge R. Slevc, L. Robert Novick, Jared M. Neurobiol Lang (Camb) Review Article The study of how bilingualism is linked to cognitive processing, including executive functioning, has historically focused on comparing bilinguals to monolinguals across a range of tasks. These group comparisons presume to capture relatively stable cognitive traits and have revealed important insights about the architecture of the language processing system that could not have been gleaned from studying monolinguals alone. However, there are drawbacks to using a group-comparison, or Traits, approach. In this theoretical review, we outline some limitations of treating executive functions as stable traits and of treating bilinguals as a uniform group when compared to monolinguals. To build on what we have learned from group comparisons, we advocate for an emerging complementary approach to the question of cognition and bilingualism. Using an approach that compares bilinguals to themselves under different linguistic or cognitive contexts allows researchers to ask questions about how language and cognitive processes interact based on dynamically fluctuating cognitive and neural states. A States approach, which has already been used by bilingualism researchers, allows for cause-and-effect hypotheses and shifts our focus from questions of group differences to questions of how varied linguistic environments influence cognitive operations in the moment and how fluctuations in cognitive engagement impact language processing. MIT Press 2021-11-11 /pmc/articles/PMC10158593/ /pubmed/37214629 http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00046 Text en © 2021 Massachusetts Institute of Technology https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Review Article
Salig, Lauren K.
Valdés Kroff, Jorge R.
Slevc, L. Robert
Novick, Jared M.
Moving From Bilingual Traits to States: Understanding Cognition and Language Processing Through Moment-to-Moment Variation
title Moving From Bilingual Traits to States: Understanding Cognition and Language Processing Through Moment-to-Moment Variation
title_full Moving From Bilingual Traits to States: Understanding Cognition and Language Processing Through Moment-to-Moment Variation
title_fullStr Moving From Bilingual Traits to States: Understanding Cognition and Language Processing Through Moment-to-Moment Variation
title_full_unstemmed Moving From Bilingual Traits to States: Understanding Cognition and Language Processing Through Moment-to-Moment Variation
title_short Moving From Bilingual Traits to States: Understanding Cognition and Language Processing Through Moment-to-Moment Variation
title_sort moving from bilingual traits to states: understanding cognition and language processing through moment-to-moment variation
topic Review Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10158593/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37214629
http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00046
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