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Does Bilingualism Reduce False Hearing in Older Adults?
Poster C53 in Poster Session C, Friday, October 7, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Chad Rogers1, Isabela Albuja1; 1Union College
Being bilingual is not only about speaking more than one language, it is a quality that could be a protective factor against cognitive decline. Previous research has demonstrated that bilinguals frequently outperform monolinguals in tasks that are associated with age-related cognitive decline to executive function, working memory, and inhibitory control. Green (1998) proposed the Inhibitory Control Model (ICM) which states that when speaking a given language, bilinguals need to inhibit the other language they know but are not currently using. This model holds that constant inhibition of the non-target language reinforces bilinguals’ inhibitory control abilities, which confer benefits on more general executive control tasks. The aim of the current study is to examine whether an age-related bilingual advantage would generalize to the generalize to the false hearing task (e.g., Rogers, 2017), a language task related to cognitive control (Failes, Sommers, & Jacoby, 2020). In one version of the false hearing task, participants hear a clearly presented cue word followed by a target word masked by noise. The cue word can either be related to the target (e.g., “BARN-HAY”), related to a word that sounds like the target (“BARN-PAY”), or totally unrelated to the target (e.g., “BARN-FUN”). Participants identify the word in noise, rate their confidence, and are instructed to respond only on the basis of what they heard, not the associative context primed by the cue word. An online version of the false hearing task was administered to young and older adults who self-reported as being either monolingual or bilingual. Results will be evaluated in terms of bilinguals’ presumed capacity of inhibiting irrelevant stimuli as predicted by the ICM and implications towards aging will be discussed.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Control, Selection, and Executive Processes