The primary purpose of the proposed research program is to improve the understanding of the effects of normal aging on language processing in bilinguals. In the proposed studies, the investigator will extend new methods and concepts from the literature on aging in monolinguals to the special problems faced by multilingual adults, with emphasis on the potential for between-language interference in fluent comprehension and production. The proposed experiments focus on the interplay between semantic and/or linguistic inhibition, and their contribution to lexical access in and out of a discourse context. Participants will be Spanish-English bilinguals (elderly bilinguals, and college-age controls under normal and stressed conditions), tested in a series of """"""""on-line"""""""" (real time) methods for the assessment of word comprehension and production. All experiments are administered in both Spanish and English. Individuals will be screened to assess language history and language dominance in """"""""off-line"""""""" (untimed) and on-line (timed) situations. The proposed on-line tasks will include word repetition (i.e. """"""""auditory naming""""""""), picture naming, picture-word priming, and picture-word Stroop tasks. The investigator's results to date with a subset of these methods suggest that the ability to process words from Language A while listening to Language B is markedly slowed in elderly bilinguals, and in young bilinguals processing the same stimuli under adverse conditions. These laboratory findings have implications for the language switching commonly experienced by bilinguals in daily life. Results will also provide information relevant to competing accounts of cognitive declines in normal aging (based primarily on studies of monolinguals), including slowed or reduced activation, reductions in working memory, and/or a reduced ability to inhibit competing responses that are not relevant to the task.
| Hernandez, Arturo E; Reyes, Iliana (2002) Within- and between-language priming differ: evidence from repetition of pictures in Spanish-English bilinguals. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 28:726-34 |
| Hernandez, A E; Dapretto, M; Mazziotta, J et al. (2001) Language switching and language representation in Spanish-English bilinguals: an fMRI study. Neuroimage 14:510-20 |
| Roe, K; Jahn-Samilo, J; Juarez, L et al. (2000) Contextual effects on word production: a lifespan study. Mem Cognit 28:756-65 |
| Hernandez, A E; Martinez, A; Kohnert, K (2000) In search of the language switch: An fMRI study of picture naming in Spanish-English bilinguals. Brain Lang 73:421-31 |
