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Bilinguals’ Working Memory (WM) Advantage and Their Dual Language Practices

The present study investigates a possible working memory (WM) difference between monolingual and bilingual groups and explores the relationship between their WM advantage and language practices. A mixed methods design was employed for the study. To measure participants’ WM, auditory and visual digit...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Yang, Eunju
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5532599/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28718840
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci7070086
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author Yang, Eunju
author_facet Yang, Eunju
author_sort Yang, Eunju
collection PubMed
description The present study investigates a possible working memory (WM) difference between monolingual and bilingual groups and explores the relationship between their WM advantage and language practices. A mixed methods design was employed for the study. To measure participants’ WM, auditory and visual digit span tasks were conducted on the different language groups: 20 Korean near-monolinguals, and 40 Korean–English bilinguals with two different levels of second language (L2) proficiency. Bilinguals’ daily language practices were explored through semi-structured interviews with eight bilinguals. The convergence of the findings from both tests and interview data suggests that knowing two languages does not guarantee bilingual WM advantages over monolinguals, but the advantage might be linked to bilinguals’ unique L2 use environment where they need to hold incoming L2 information while decoding it.
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spelling pubmed-55325992017-08-07 Bilinguals’ Working Memory (WM) Advantage and Their Dual Language Practices Yang, Eunju Brain Sci Article The present study investigates a possible working memory (WM) difference between monolingual and bilingual groups and explores the relationship between their WM advantage and language practices. A mixed methods design was employed for the study. To measure participants’ WM, auditory and visual digit span tasks were conducted on the different language groups: 20 Korean near-monolinguals, and 40 Korean–English bilinguals with two different levels of second language (L2) proficiency. Bilinguals’ daily language practices were explored through semi-structured interviews with eight bilinguals. The convergence of the findings from both tests and interview data suggests that knowing two languages does not guarantee bilingual WM advantages over monolinguals, but the advantage might be linked to bilinguals’ unique L2 use environment where they need to hold incoming L2 information while decoding it. MDPI 2017-07-18 /pmc/articles/PMC5532599/ /pubmed/28718840 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci7070086 Text en © 2017 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Yang, Eunju
Bilinguals’ Working Memory (WM) Advantage and Their Dual Language Practices
title Bilinguals’ Working Memory (WM) Advantage and Their Dual Language Practices
title_full Bilinguals’ Working Memory (WM) Advantage and Their Dual Language Practices
title_fullStr Bilinguals’ Working Memory (WM) Advantage and Their Dual Language Practices
title_full_unstemmed Bilinguals’ Working Memory (WM) Advantage and Their Dual Language Practices
title_short Bilinguals’ Working Memory (WM) Advantage and Their Dual Language Practices
title_sort bilinguals’ working memory (wm) advantage and their dual language practices
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5532599/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28718840
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci7070086
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