Hostname: page-component-669899f699-8p65j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-28T10:38:55.439Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Language dominance and inhibition abilities in bilingual older adults*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2013

MIRA GORAL ,
LUCA CAMPANELLI  and
AVRON SPIRO III
MIRA GORAL*
Affiliation:
Lehman College & the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
LUCA CAMPANELLI
Affiliation:
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
AVRON SPIRO III
Affiliation:
VA Boston Healthcare System & Boston University Schools of Public Health and Medicine
*
Address for correspondence: Mira Goral, Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, Speech Building, room 227, Lehman College 250 Bedford Park Blvd., Bronx, NY 10468, USA[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the so-called bilingual advantage in older adults’ performance in three cognitive domains and to identify whether language use and bilingual type (dominant vs. balanced) predicted performance. The participants were 106 Spanish–English bilinguals ranging in age from 50 years to 84 years. Three cognitive domains were examined (each by a single test): inhibition (the Simon task), alternating attention (the Trail Making test), and working memory (Month Ordering). The data revealed that age was negatively correlated to performance in each domain. Bilingual type – balanced vs. dominant – predicted performance and interacted with age only on the inhibition measure (the Simon task). Balanced bilinguals showed age-related inhibition decline (i.e., greater Simon effect with increasing age); in contrast, dominant bilinguals showed little or no age-related change. The findings suggest that bilingualism may offer cognitive advantage in older age only for a subset of bilinguals.

Keywords

bilingualdominantaginginhibition
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 79 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

*

We thank Tali Swann-Sternberg, Beatriz Munoz, Nicole Murphy, Caroline Cano, and Kay Germano for assistance in data collection and data entry and we thank our participants. We are also grateful to Loraine K. Obler and Martin L. Albert for their input in the early stages of this project and their support throughout. We are also grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This project was funded in part by NIH/NIA grants R03#AG27532 (PI: Goral) and R01#AG14345 (PI: Albert). Dr. Spiro was also supported by a Merit Review and a Research Career Scientist award from the US Department of Veterans Affairs, Clinical Science Research and Development Service.

References

Abutalebi, J., & Green, D. W. (2007). Bilingual language production: The neurocognition of language representation and control. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 20, 242–275.Google Scholar
Albert, M. L., Spiro, A. III, Sayers, K., Cohen, J., Brady, C., Goral, M., & Obler, L. K. (2009). Effects of health status on word finding in aging. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 57, 2300–2305.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ashendorf, L., & McCaffrey, R. J. (2008). Exploring age-related decline on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 22, 262–272.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M., Klein, R., & Viswanathan, M. (2004). Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: Evidence from the Simon task. Psychology and Aging, 19, 290–303.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M., & Luk, G. (2008). Cognitive control and lexical access in younger and older bilinguals. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 34, 859–873.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E., Martin, M. M., & Viswanathan, M. (2005). Bilingualism across the lifespan: The rise and fall of inhibitory control. International Journal of Bilingualism, 9, 103–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cabeza, R., Nyberg, L., & Park, D. (eds.) (2005). Cognitive neuroscience of aging: Linking cognitive and cerebral aging. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cahana-Amitay, D., Albert, M. L., Ojo, E. A., Sayers, J., Goral, M., Obler, L. K., & Spiro, A. III. Effects of hypertension and diabetes on sentence comprehension in aging. Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, doi:10.1093/geronb/gbs085. Published online by Oxford University Press, October 9, 2012.Google Scholar
Christoffels, I. K., De Groot, A. M. B., & Kroll, J. F. (2006). Memory and language skill in simultaneous interpreting: The role of expertise and language proficiency. Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 324–345.Google Scholar
Colzato, L. S., Bajo, M. T., van den Wildenberg, W., Paolieri, D., Nieuwenhuis, S. T., La Heij, W., & Hommel, B. (2008). How does bilingualism improve executive control? A comparison of active and reactive inhibition mechanisms. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 302–312.Google ScholarPubMed
Connor, L. T., Spiro, A. III, Obler, L. K., & Albert, M. L. (2004). Change in object naming during adulthood. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 59, 203–209.Google Scholar
Costa, A., & Santesteban, M. (2004). Lexical access in bilingual speech production: Evidence from language switching in highly proficient bilinguals and L2 learners. Journal of Memory and Language, 50, 491–511.Google Scholar
Flege, J. E., MacKay, I. R. A., & Piske, T. (2002). Assessing bilingual dominance. Applied Psycholinguistics, 23, 567–598.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Folstein, M. F., Folstein, S. E., & McHugh, P. R. (1975). Mini-Mental State: A practical method for grading the cognitive state of patients for the clinician. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 12, 189–198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ghisletta, P., McArdle, J. J., & Lindenberger, U. (2006). Longitudinal cognition-survival relations in old and very old age. European Psychologist, 11, 204–223.Google Scholar
Goral, M. (2012). Multiple languages in the adult brain. In Faust, M. (ed.), The handbook of the neuropsychology of language, pp. 720–737. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Goral, M., Clark-Cotton, M. R., Spiro, A. III, Obler, L. K., Verkuilen, J., & Albert, M. L. (2011). The contribution of set switching and working memory to sentence processing in older adults. Experimental Aging Research, 37, 516–538.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goral, M., Spiro, A. III, Albert, M. L., Obler, L. K., & Connor, L. (2007). Change in lexical-retrieval skills in adulthood. The Mental Lexicon, 2, 215–238.Google Scholar
Green, D. W. (1998). Mental control of the bilingual lexico-semantic system. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1, 67–81.Google Scholar
Green, D. W., & Abutalebi, J. (2008). Understanding the link between bilingual aphasia and language control. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 21, 558–576.Google Scholar
Grosjean, F. (2008). Studying bilinguals. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Harel, O. (2009). The estimation of R2 and adjusted R2 in incomplete data sets using multiple imputation. Journal of Applied Statistics, 36, 1109–1118.Google Scholar
Hernández, M., Costa, A., Fuentes, L. J., Vivas, A. B., & Sebatian-Gallés, N. (2010). The impact of bilingualism on the executive control and orienting networks of attention. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 315–325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hilchey, M. D., & Klein, R. M. (2011). Are there bilingual advantages on nonlinguistic interference tasks? Implications for the plasticity of executive control processes. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18, 625–658.Google Scholar
Hultsch, D. F., MacDonald, W. S., & Dixon, R. A. (2002). Variability in reaction time performance of younger and older adults. The Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 57B, 101–115.Google Scholar
Ibáñez, A., Macizo, P., & Bajo, M. T. (2010). Language access and language selection in professional translators. Acta Psychologica, 135, 257–266.Google Scholar
Kavé, G., Eyal, N., Shorek, A., & Cohen-Mansfield, J. (2008). Multilingualism and cognitive state in the oldest old. Psychology & Aging, 23, 70–78.Google Scholar
Kempler, D., Almor, A., Tyler, L., Andersen, E. S., & MacDonald, M. C. (1998). Sentence comprehension deficits in Alzheimer's disease: A comparison of off-line vs. on-line sentence processing. Brain and Language, 64, 297–316.Google Scholar
Kousaie, S., & Phillips, N. A. (2012). Ageing and bilingualism: Absence of a “bilingual advantage” in Stroop interference in a nonimmigrant sample. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65, 356–369.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroll, J. F., Bobb, S. C., & Wodniecka, Z. (2006). Language selectivity is the exception, not the rule: Arguments against a fixed locus of language selection in bilingual speech. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9, 119–135.Google Scholar
Little, R. J. A., & Rubin, D. B. (2002). Statistical analysis with missing data (2nd edn.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Google Scholar
Macizo, P., Bajo, M. T., & Martín, M. C. (2010). Inhibitory processes in bilingual language comprehension: Evidence from Spanish–English interlexical homographs. Journal of Memory and Language, 63, 232–244.Google Scholar
Marchenko, Y. (2010). mibeta: Standardized coefficients for multiply-imputed data (Version 1.0) [Stata package]. http://www.stata.com/users/ymarchenko/mibeta/mibeta.ado (retrieved December 15, 2011).Google Scholar
Margolin, S. J., & Abrams, L. (2009). Not may not be too difficult: The effects of negation on older adults’ sentence comprehension. Educational Gerontology, 35, 306–320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marian, V., Blumenfeld, H. K., & Kaushanskaya, M. (2007). The Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q): Assessing language profiles in bilinguals and multilinguals. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50, 940–967.Google Scholar
Meuter, R. F. I., & Allport, A. (1999). Bilingual language switching in naming: Asymmetrical costs of language selection. Journal of Memory and Language, 40, 25–40.Google Scholar
Miyake, A., Friedman, N. P., Emerson, M. J., Witzki, A. H., Howerter, A., & Wager, T. (2000). The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex “frontal lobe” tasks: A latent variable analysis. Cognitive Psychology, 41, 49–100.Google Scholar
Park, D. C., Lautenschlager, G., Hedden, T., Davidson, N., Smith, A. D., & Smith, P. (2002). Models of visuospatial and verbal memory across the adult life span. Psychology and Aging, 17, 299–320.Google Scholar
Prior, A., & Gollan, T. H. (2011). Good language-switchers are good task-switchers: Evidence from Spanish–English and Mandarin–English bilinguals. The Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 17, 682–691.Google Scholar
Prior, A., & MacWhinney, B. (2010). A bilingual advantage in task switching. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 253–262.Google Scholar
Raz, N. (2009). Decline and compensation in aging brain and cognition: Promises and constraints. Neuropsychological Review, 19, 411–414.Google Scholar
Rivera Mindt, M., Arentoft, A., Germano, K. K., D'Aquila, E., Scheiner, D., Pizzirusso, M., Sandoval, T. C., & Gollan, T. (2008). Neuropsychological, cognitive, and theoretical considerations for evaluation of bilingual individuals. Neuropsychology Review, 18, 255–268.Google Scholar
Royston, P., Altman, D. G., & Sauerbrei, W. (2006). Dichotomizing continuous predictors in multiple regression: A bad idea. Statistics in Medicine, 25, 127–141.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Salthouse, T. A., & Fristoe, N. M. (1995). A process analysis of adult age effects on a computer-administered Trail Making test. Neuropsychology, 9, 518–528.Google Scholar
Salthouse, T. A., Toth, J., Daniels, K., Parks, C., Pak, R., Wolbrette, M., & Hocking, K. J. (2000). Effects of aging on efficiency of task switching in a variant of the Trail Making test. Neuropsychology, 14, 102–111.Google Scholar
Salvatierra, J. L., & Rosselli, M. (2011). The effect of bilingualism and age on inhibitory control. International Journal of Bilingualism, 15, 26–37.Google Scholar
Simon, J. R., & Wolf, J. D. (1963). Choice reaction times as a function of angular stimulus–response correspondence and age. Ergonomics, 6, 99–105.Google Scholar
Soveri, A., Laine, M., Hämäläinen, H., & Hugdahl, K. (2011). Bilingual advantage in attentional control: Evidence from the forced-attention dichotic listening paradigm. Bilingualism: Language & Cognition, 14, 371–378.Google Scholar
Spiro, A. III, & Brady, C. B. (2011). Integrating health into cognitive aging: Toward a preventive cognitive neuroscience of aging. The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 66B (Supplement 1), i17–25.Google Scholar
Spreen, O., & Strauss, E. (1991). A compendium of neuropsychological tests: Administration, norms, and commentary. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
StataCorp (2011). Stata Statistical Software: Release 12. College Station, TX: StataCorp LP.Google Scholar
Stern, Y. (2009). Cognitive reserve. Neuropsychologia, 47, 2015–2028.Google Scholar
Touradji, P., Manly, J. J., Jacobs, D. M., & Stern, Y. (2001). Neuropsychological test performance: A study of non-Hispanic white elderly. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 23, 643–649.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van der Elst, W., Van Boxtel, M. P. J., Van Breukelen, G. J. P., & Jolles, J. (2006). The Stroop color-word test: Influence of age, sex, and education; and normative data for a large sample across the adult age range. Assessment, 13, 62–79.Google Scholar
Van der Lubbe, R. H. V., & Verleger, R. (2002). Aging and the Simon task. Psychophysiology, 39, 100–110.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Verhaeghen, P., & Cerella, J. (2002). Aging, executive control, and attention: A review of meta-analyses. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 26, 849–857.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Waters, G. S., & Caplan, D. (2005). The relationship between age, processing speed, working memory capacity and language comprehension. Memory, 13, 403–413.Google Scholar
Wei, L., & Moyer, M. G. (eds.) (2008). The Blackwell handbook of research methods on bilingualism and multilingualism. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
West, R., & Alain, C. (2000). Age-related decline in inhibitory control contributes to the increased Stroop effect observed in older adults. Psychophysiology, 37, 179–189.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Goral Supplementary Material

Appendix

Download Goral Supplementary Material(PDF)
PDF 32 KB