Bilingualism reading group

Speaker: Dalia García (University of California, Riverside)

Title: Catching the Cognitive Consequences of Bilingual Language Processing on the Fly

Abstract: Bilingualism has consequences for language processing (Kroll et al., 2008) and cognitive functioning (Bialystok, 2017). However, most of the literature on bilingualism and cognition does not examine how bilinguals process language in relation to their cognitive abilities. The goal of this study is to capture how cognitive control is engaged while language is processed. To do this, we use a novel cross-task adaptation paradigm (Hsu & Novick, 2016) that interleaves a Stroop task and a sentence comprehension task using the visual-world paradigm. This setup will allow us to determine how the engagement of cognitive control modulates processing costs associated with syntactic/semantic ambiguity. We specifically compare performance of English monolinguals and proficient bilinguals to characterize similarities and differences in how the two groups adapt to conflict more generally.