Hi. Welcome back to our Office Hours.

I'm here with the Dr.

Arturo Hernandez to answer some of the questions that we found in forms.

So let's just dive right in and get started.

The first question has to do with a little bit of confusion from video 6.5.

In that video you talk about how children have more difficulty switching,

like they slow down when they have to switch.

And then adults have a, they don't have as much of the difficulty in switching,

so the switching costs decrease for adults.

But then, you then say that the ability to

switch between tasks becomes more difficult for adults even though it

seems like it was kind of the opposite from what you said before.

Would you be able to clarify that a little?

>> Sure.

I, I guess the confusion is I should have said older adults [CROSSTALK] and somehow

that word didn't come out so, essentially what happens is the switching effect or

the cost of having to switch between tasks is largest in younger children and

then it, that slowdown gets smaller.

So in other words, it starts to approach just doing one single task.

It's never the same, it's always slower to do,

to switch between tasks than do a single task, but that difference gets smaller.

And then it stays pretty stable up until about 40 to 50, and

then it grows again after 60, roughly.

>> Mm-hm.

>> So, you see basically something like this that gets smaller and

then, it gets larger again.

So.

>> Okay. So, that's what you've meant by-

>> Right.

>> Older adults.

>> Yeah. >> Actually have more difficult times.

>> That's correct.

>> Okay. >> The older adults have a more difficult

time switching, which is interesting in light of the fact that older adults in

our literature seems to be showing that older adult bilinguals seem to show

an advantage relative to young adult sorry relative to monolinguals.

And that advance seems to be bigger.

The interesting thing about the data that we collected was that

the older adults showed more of a slowdown relative to the young adult bilinguals.

So even though switching is much harder for

them, and that's also true in the, in the monolingual literature.

Maybe one suggestion is that because it's so

hard to switch for older adults in general if a bilingual has to do that,

where they're speaking to one set of people and then they switch to speaking to

another set of people that that's a sort of form of mental exercise.

That's the, that's the suggestion from the literature.

Because our, our effects were pretty gargantuan.

And it's, you could see it and it's maybe a second, second and

a half longer between the young adult and the older adult bilingual.

Or I think it's something like 400 milliseconds when you look

at just a single condition or a single language.

So it's a really big effect and, and it's there also in children,

although children of course are developing, so there is the added thing of

having learning language, on top of the switching.

But again yes, it should have been older adults.

>> Okay, so we hope that that clarifies things-

>> [LAUGH].

>> For you guys, it was a little confusing so hopefully that takes care of that.

So the next question comes from a poster who was kind of disappointed that we

didn't talk more about ASL and

acquisition of a sign language as opposed to a spoken language.

And they were wondering if there are differences in brain

imaging of deaf children who were exposed to ASL early in life and

those who were exposed later in life.

>> So we have, I mean, I guess I'll just start by saying that lots of people come

up and ask me, you know, why don't we do a study with Vietnamese-English bilinguals.

Or with you know you know Hebrew-English bilinguals.

I mean I've gotten all sorts of questions along the, the way, and

I always say if you can find someone who's a linguist, who knows about the language,

and understands the culture, and understands the dynamics

of that population in that particular situation, then I'm happy to do a study.

But I really feel, actually having grown up bilingual myself and

sort of having a sensitivity to the differences and

the sort of particulars of each population, that I don't

feel that confident exploring a population which I don't understand that well.

Now I ca, of course, that doesn't mean I will do,

never do anything that I don't understand that well.

But the point is, if I'm going to do that,

then I want someone who really, really understands that population.

So if I were going to study Chinese-English bilinguals,

I would ask my colleague Ping Lee to please collaborate with me because he

understands the population.

He's Chinese, he has a daughter who's Chinese-American so, he will understand

the dynamics across both countries and some of the factors that might

play a role in the study that I don't have the sensitivity to, in the same way.

I can ask lots of questions, but I just don't have that experience and

that and that expertise on top of the fact that Ping Lee is a chi,

is a linguist by training, so you can't get any better than that.

So that's the type of person I would seek out.

In terms of sign language work, if I were to do work in that domain, and

we do have one published study where we have found some differences,

not in the of the brain, but in terms of attentional control depending on

whether bilinguals are, are early or later acquirers of a second language.

And and also how proficient they are in their second language.

We did find some attentional differences there and

that was done by a student of mine Poorna Kushalnagar who is a deaf and

who is deaf and also an ASL English bilingual.

So she understood the population, she understood,

she had a very beautiful task that she set up as her, part of her dissertation and

that got published and in that case I was happy to go along with that work.

But if I were to do this work, I would, I would ask Rachel Mayberry.

She's at U.C. San Diego.

She's done lots of work.

Looking at the issues of AoA age-of-acquisition,

proficiency in ASL English bilinguals.

It's very, very well done work work that's very well done, very well controlled and

they do find some differences.

So the, the reason is partly because I felt that was just a little too far out,

outside of my area of expertise.

>> Hm.

>> And there's lots of issues that come up because sign language is

a visual spatial language but at the same time it is language.

And so, these sort of intricacies when I go to talks and I,

you know Karen Emery is another person who does a lot of work, David also, I know,

I know them quite well.

As colleagues and

having seen their talks it's clear there's a lot of complexity to that issue.

And its complexity for which it would be difficult for

me to bridge that and feel confident in my results.

And most scientists want to feel at least some confidence that what they're

measuring is exactly what they intended to measure at the beginning and

not something else.

>> Hm.

Mm-hm.

So, just kind of, maybe a very quick follow-up.

is, do you know of any studies that show

a difference between spoken language versus sign language?

>> Yeah, sure.

I mean, you can look up Karen Emery and David Karina, and also Rachel Mayberry,

and they will, there are quite a few studies.

David Karina's a UC, UC, UC Davis is California Davis.

Karen Emery is at San Diego State University.

Rachel Mabry, Mayberry is at UC San Diego.

University of California, San Diego.

And all three of them show pretty clear differences between brain the way that

the sign language is instantiated in the brain versus spoken language.

On the other hand, there are also many similarities,

at least from my understanding, language is language.

They're trying to, even though it may be a spatial signal, it's still trying to

communicate what language communicates in a very tight, time window.

There's some interesting differences too.

So sign language, they can sign and speak at the same time.

>> Mm-hm. >> So for

example, the interference effect, this, advantage that appears in what,

what are called unimodel bilinguals doesn't appear in bimodal bilinguals,

because they can sign and speak, so there's less interference, in that sense.

>> Mm-hm. >> So there's some

interesting differences with spoken bilingualism.

but, yeah, there's, there, there are, there are studies that have shown both

these differences and similarities between spoken and sign language.

>> All right. Well, I hope that that kind of helps

clear things up as to why we don't discuss it so much and

in this course and give the poster some feature readings to look into, all right?

So the last question that we have today this has to do with a little bit of

confusion, confusion about what control actually means.

Is this something we have learned,

is this something that just kind of develops naturally?

What is control?

>> That's a really good question.

>> [LAUGH]. >> And, and we could, it, it,

gets more complicated if we go from control to working memory or

to executive functions.

So these are labels that are given to things basically which involve you.

And we can start maybe with the simplest version of control, so does,

does it, does it, so what was that question was does it de, it develops.

I'm going to talk about that, but.

That there was another quest, sub question.

>> Just what is control, what does it mean how do we learn it?

>> And do we have to train it, was that the other question?

>> How do we learn it?

>> How do we learn it.

Okay.

Simple.

All right, so, if we think about sort of

the simplest form of control you could think about object permanence.

And I did talk about this again in the course, but

the idea Pagge had that you know at certain ages infants will, will search for

something even though it's hidden, right?

And so we could think of a form of control as being able to think about

something that we can't see, which would he would describe as representation,

it's something in the mind that's not in the world.

And in order to do that requires control because it it requires for us to attend

to something that we can imagine, but we can't actually see.

Visualization, if you will.

And so that's a very early form of control.

It does develop on it's own.

It develops a, I mean, you can train it, in the sense that now they have

Lumosity or things like this where you can do these brain training games, but,

really, the best form of brain training is just to be in the world, right?

So, to interact, to navigate through the world, to interact with adults.

We could think of symbolic representation as an extension of that.

Now suddenly we have a word.

A bee, right?

Which doesn't really have anything to do wit the bee that flies around.

And suddenly we have to attach this sound bit

to a visual representation, and that requires control.

It requires us to now map, make this mapping, right?

And so that, in some ways we have to stop thinking about the sound of this word and

attach it to a thing in the world.

>> Mm-hm.

>> So again another extension of control.

Not just worry about bee.

Just saying bee, which is part of what an, an infant does is to say the, you know,

make the sounds.

But eventually it's to sort of, okay now I've got these sounds.

Now I've gotta attach them to a thing.

And of course, we could say okay, bee, and

then I show you a little picture of the bee, or

we could say now, give me a word that sounds like bee and now I say key, right?

So now I've attended to the sound of the word and

come up with another word that sounds like it, or

I have attended to the meaning of the word and come up with a visual of that.

>> Mm-hm. >> And that requires again,

you going from one thing to another thing.

To sort of selectively accessing some part of the signal that comes in.

So, we could argue that control is present in pretty much everything that we do.

It's just how much control it requires.

And some things, of course, have become quite automatic and fast will require less

control, but control is present pretty much in everything.

And, and there is a, I think the easiest way for

me to make sense of it is to think about what the brain does.

If we think about the parietal lobe, roughly about here.

Office Hours 6

The Bilingual Brain

Rencontrer les enseignants