Recent evidence suggests that the task of managing a bilingual individual’s two languages is carried out by general attentional mechanisms. Researchers have found evidence for bilingual advantages in attention, specifically on tasks that involve inhibiting irrelevant information, which are believed to stem from lifelong practice at inhibiting the language system not currently in use. In the present study we hypothesized that, since bilinguals are better at inhibiting irrelevant information, they should show memory disadvantages if previously irrelevant information becomes relevant. 12 bilingual and 12 monolingual participants (age range:19-27) were tested in an eye tracking paradigm where the relational manipulation effect (the tendency to direct more viewing to manipulated regions of previously viewed scenes) was used to access memory for scenes that had been presented as distractors during a study block. No differences in memory were observed. However, we observed a significant difference in general viewing patterns between the two language groups, such that bilinguals made significantly shorter fixations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OTU.1807/25436 |
| Date | 15 December 2010 |
| Creators | Braverman, Anna |
| Contributors | Ryan, Jennifer D. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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