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Pupillary response of monolinguals and bilinguals in linguistic and nonlinguistic processing
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Poster A40 in Poster Session A, Tuesday, October 24, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Wenfu Bao1, Alexandra Nastasa1, Claude Alain1, Michael Thaut1, Monika Molnar1; 1University of Toronto
Introduction. Changes in pupillary response is a physiological measure of cognitive processing load (Granholm et al., 1996; Partala et al., 2000). Limited prior research has explored the effects of language background on pupillary response in speech processing. For example, relative to native speakers, greater pupil size was observed in nonnative participants when listening to English as a second language, suggesting increased listening effort (Borghini & Hazan, 2018; 2020). However, few studies have addressed how bilingual experience impacts pupil response when processing speech and nonspeech stimuli in general. The present study was designed to compare pupillary response between monolinguals and bilinguals in linguistic and nonlinguistic auditory processing with different cognitive load. Methods. Based on previous research (e.g., Borghini & Hazan, 2020), 70 English speakers (aged 18-25, controlled for sex and socioeconomic status) will be tested, including 35 monolingual and 35 simultaneous bilingual who spoke another language but learned both before age 3. Participants performed two active listening tasks: linguistic and nonlinguistic, with 18 trials (around 15 minutes) each. In the linguistic task, they listened to short passages (in English or an unfamiliar language) while watching a video on the screen, then answered whether they heard a target word. In the nonlinguistic task, they listened to sequences of musical tones (simple or complex, varied by instrument varieties) while watching the video and were asked whether they heard a target instrument sound. Participants’ pupil data were collected using an EyeLink 1000 Plus eye tracker (SR Research, Canada), preprocessed using the PupilPre package (Kyröläinen et al., 2019), and analyzed through generalized additive mixed-effects modeling as it is well designed for time series data analysis (van Rij et al., 2019). Results. Preliminary results reveal different pupillary response in linguistic and nonlinguistic processing. Specifically, in the linguistic task, bilinguals had larger pupil size than monolinguals when listening to English as the familiar language. Further, bilinguals showed similar pupil dilation when attending to familiar and unfamiliar languages, whereas monolinguals did not. In the nonlinguistic task, however, we did not observe group differences. Further discussion will be provided regarding the detailed results. Conclusion. In summary, our findings demonstrate increased pupil dilation in bilinguals than monolinguals when listening to familiar spoken language. This could be attributed to bilinguals’ different linguistic experience, as they are generally exposed to more variability in their input than monolinguals, which could lead to more attentional resources required in language processing. Yet, no group differences when listening to musical sounds suggests that bilingual experience affects linguistic and nonlinguistic auditory processing differently. Overall, these findings contribute to building theories of bilingual language and cognition, which are currently lacking in the field (Blanco-Elorrieta & Caramazza, 2021).
Topic Areas: Multilingualism,