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Cognitive Implications of Bilingualism

2021· reference-entry· en· W3173029803 on OpenAlexaff
Ellen Bialystok

Bibliographic record

VenueOxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology · 2021
Typereference-entry
Languageen
FieldNeuroscience
TopicNeurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
Canadian institutionsYork University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNeuroscience of multilingualismPsychologyCognitionExecutive functionsNeuroimagingDevelopmental psychologyCognitive psychologyNeuroscience

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract There has been an enormous expansion during the early 21st century in psychological research on topics relating to bilingualism, paralleling developments in other fields of psychology that investigate the interface between experience and the mind. These issues reflect the view that brains and minds remain plastic and can be modified by experience throughout life. In the case of bilingualism, a central question is whether bilingual experience modifies cognitive systems in general, and more specifically, if it improves cognitive ability and executive functioning. The research has produced contradictory results, in some cases supporting a beneficial effect on cognition and in some cases indicating no effect. Crucially, there is essentially no research that indicates that bilingualism is associated with poorer cognitive outcomes than found for those who are monolingual. Studies showing a positive role for bilingualism on cognitive outcomes have been reported across the life span. Early research with children in the first half of the 20th century concluded that bilingualism was detrimental to children’s intelligence, a claim that has been thoroughly refuted and replaced with evidence identifying specific cognitive processes that are more advanced in bilingual than in monolingual children. A few studies have even reported better attentional control, the foundation of executive functioning, for infants in the first year of life being raised in bilingual homes than for those in monolingual environments. Young adults frequently show no behavioral differences between language groups when performing executive function tasks, but neuroimaging (electrophysiology or brain imaging) consistently indicates that monolinguals and bilinguals use different brain regions and different degrees of effort to perform these tasks. The clearest language group differences, however, occur in older age where evidence for cognitive reserve from bilingualism is found most clearly in the postponement of symptoms of dementia. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the factors that mediate these effects, notably, the nature of bilingual experience and the details of the cognitive task being used. The conclusion is that bilingualism is complex but there is evidence for a consistent and systematic impact on cognitive systems.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.008
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.867
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.008
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.156
GPT teacher head0.465
Teacher spread0.309 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2021
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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