Male Speaker: We're really happy today to have
Arturo Hernandez.
He's a professor of psychology at the
University of Houston.
His research interests are neural underpinnings of
bilingual language processing and second
language acquisition in children and adults,
variety of neuroimaging methods as well as
behavioral techniques to investigate these
phenomenons and published in several peer review
He's been funded both by us at the National
Institute of Health and
at the National Science Foundation.
In 2014, he was awarded the Friedrich Wilhelm
Bessel research award.
He spent a year with Dr. Christian Beibach [phonetic sp]
at the Goethe University in
Frankfurt where he investigated the role of
genetics and bilingualism on the ability to flexibly
adapt to different cognitive tasks.
Arturo, we welcome you today.
Really happy that you could be here and I'm
going to turn this over to you and
let you take it away.
Arturo Hernandez: Alright.
Thanks for the nice introduction.
I'm really happy to be here as well, wherever
"here" might be.
All of us are in different "heres," but together,
I suppose.
In any case, I am going to talk about immergences in
the language control in the bilingual brain, and I
really want to start with the question of bilingual
advantage because I think that in recent years
that's become a quite contentious topic.
And I think there's lots of evidence on both sides
suggesting that this is a complex kind
of thing to understand.
Initially, in 2012, I think that was the -- I
want to say about 2008 was the time when I began to
see more and more students coming through who really
wanted to study bilingualism and cognitive
control, and that has
died off somewhat more recently.
So, you can see here
two headlines from 2012, "why bilinguals are smarter,"
right, and then this one from 2016 "the bitter
fight over the benefits of bilingualism."
Right, so the question is, you know,
what is [inaudible]?
So, Manolo Carreiras, who's at the Basque
research for framing language, at the institute
there -- he's the head of that -- shared these
slides with me and each one of the people who
firmly believes that there is no bilingual advantage,
I'll show you why in a second, but essentially,
his argument is the question is a [inaudible]
"Does something transfer from language to other
cognitive domains?"
And we go back to the study from 2004, the most
recent study that's shown this is the
[unintelligible] colleagues in which they
asked participants to look at the -- so this
was assignment tasks.
Assignment tasks, what they have to do is they
have to track the side that a shape appears.
I'm sorry, they have to
track the color of the shape.
[inaudible] Maybe a right [inaudible] I'm sorry,
when it's red, you might indicate with the right
response, when it's green with the left response, so
the button is on the right or the left and the whole
interesting part about this is that sometimes you
might have to indicate a "right" response by the
"right button" which is red, but the red item
appears on the left
side, so you get a [unintelligible].
You can think of it as a form of spacial streak,
perhaps that would be one way to describe it.
And so, what you find, and these are the studies from
2004, [inaudible] what she found with that, if you
looked at -- so these are, I have to qualify exactly
what I mean by young, monolinguals and
bilinguals, these are people that are
middle-aged and the "O" is for older, meaning older
than 65, and so when you look at this, what stands
out is that there's a difference.
Every group is slower, even this bilingual group
here, which shows it's really teeny effect, is
showing slowing, or the incongruent that is when
the decision, that is the shape is on the opposite
side that one has to press the button.
The mapping is for color, the shape is you can kind
of think of it as a nuisance [inaudible] what
you see is [inaudible] smaller effect, right, than the mono.
This becomes really evident with the older adults.
Bilingual versus the older adult monolingual.
So, the argument is that the bilinguals are able to
do this assignment task because, and the argument
should have been put forth in literature, that it has
to do with the fact they have to
manage two languages.
If you go back to this slide, you might have
some idea of this.
After having to manage competing items, either
receptively or productively, that that
leads to this advantage.
And Manolo Carreiras in the Basque retreat has
basically looked at a series of children and
what I'm going to do is just kind of go through
his slides quickly.
Just to show you the first one, bilinguals are in
green, monolinguals are in red, and so, in a verbal
scoop, nonverbal scoop example published, he
finds no difference between bilinguals and
monolinguals in the size of this effect.
So, that would be if you want the difference here
would be what he's measuring and he's just
plotting the difference and there's no difference
between bilinguals and monolinguals -- and it's
true -- and interference task with children, again,
the facilitation effect is not any different between
the two groups and this kind of shows it across
age, right, that there's just no distinction
between monolinguals and bilinguals.
And, again, a last chance to look at this effect and
again, in terms of our team, in terms of per cent
errors, no difference between these two groups.
When we look at young adults -- I believe this
is the data for young adults -- he, again,
finds no difference.
So, red for monolinguals, green for bilinguals, no
difference there.
No difference there.
Alright, now we're at the young adults, and so you
see that, again, there is no difference and when he
looked at older adults in this study that they've
done, his group has done over in the Basque
country, there's no difference.
And so, his argument -- and he's a pretty strong
proponent -- that there's no bilingual advantage.
And he and I have had conversations about it.
I don't feel nearly as strongly as he does, but
it's pretty clear that he feels very
strongly about this.
And then there have been others, Kenneth Papp [phonetic sp]
among others who've
published several papers, you know, arguing that
there is no advantage or it's very small.
So, there are some things that we see -- for
example, we do see the effect of vocabulary.
So, I'm switching here to a slightly -- and I think,
in all fairness, the argument isn't that
bilingualism isn't some form of an advantage, it's
just a question of it's a non-linguistic
or a cognitive advantage.
I think everybody would agree that bilingualism --
the way they process language is different
than a monolingual.
And we do see this emerging literature
looking at vocabulary.
So, if we look at Catalan Spanish done by Christina
Stein in 2000, they're better at learning English
relative to Spanish monolinguals and also a
novel word learning.
So, one of the questions we had was, "What if we
did set up something like looking at novel word
learning with monolinguals compared to bilinguals."
We have to be careful because what we're going
to do is we're going to
look at Spanish-English bilinguals.
There are lots of different names for them,
so I'll define them
for all the different literatures.
If someone is in [inaudible], we would call
them "early bilinguals."
Some people call them
"early sequential bilinguals."
Others call them "heritage learners" because they
learned Spanish as a heritage language.
And they're also called
"English language learners."
These are all names for the same group, and the
group is basically a group of children who are
exposed to Spanish early in life and generally
learn English somewhere around kindergarten or in
early grade school and then, over time,
transition into being more and more proficient.
We gave them some screening language history
questionnaire, a Boston Naming Test.
We end up -- at that time, we used that to measure
the proficiency of language.
We've since gone away from that because the Boston
Naming Test has some issues with
cultural sensitivity.
Even monolinguals in Mexico scored lower than
monolinguals in the U.S.
on the Boston Naming Test, which is
kind of interesting.
The data we have, some of the items are not as
common, so we've gone away from that to more
standardized versions and this study begins that.
We have them, essentially learned a bunch of words.
The words were German words and they had about
one to two and a half hours to
learn these words.
Female Speaker: No, because I don't want
to be sick.
Arturo Hernandez: We gave them flashcards
with the words--
Female Speaker: O.B.S.S.R.
Arturo Hernandez: We gave them flashcards with the
words in English and then their translations.
[inaudible] 90 percent correct, and you might be
wondering, "Okay, what language did we use?"
And that was one consideration, of course,
which was if we used a language like French, will
then a Spanish-English bilingual may be, in fact,
advantaged, right, because French and Spanish and
English, even, do share some orthographic and
lexical -- they have some orthographic and lexical
similarity and so the difference could actually
be some kind of augmentative effect.
So, we actually chose German.
German words, in the sense that any advantage that we
deemed would be present would be an advantage from
English, in learning these new words.
And, since the Spanish-English bilinguals
spread themselves across these two languages, their
proficiency would be slightly lower in English
relative to the monolinguals, so they
would be relatively disadvantaged if we're
just thinking of it purely as the language
is helping them.
So, what we did is we had a series of words; some of
them were cognates, some of them were Brüder and
brother, Nacht and night, non-cognates such as Pferd
or Korb, which are horse and basket, and then we
had English words.
The trick of this was we had them learn these
translations, but then we asked them when they went
into the scanner to make a living/non-living
judgement on each item.
Of course, we wanted them to do a really deep task,
but there were items that people disagreed
with our judgement.
For example, "hair," a lot of people called that
living and technically it's not living because
it's the root that's living.
The hair itself is not.
We were fine with that.
We weren't so worried about them being correct,
just that they all agreed and items which there was
sort of a chance, we
eliminated from the analysis.
What we found was that, in fact, the monolinguals and
bilinguals -- so these are just the times, the
reaction times for the judgements to these types
of words, to hear the English words, and in
other studies we've done, we generally find that
monolinguals outrank -- other studies that we've
done in other labs as well have found that
monolinguals, generally,
are faster than bilinguals.
I noticed that this task in particular -- these are
not really fast reaction times for single words.
If we were reading single words, we'd be in a much
lower, maybe even the 400-millisecond range,
maybe the 700, maybe even faster.
But we're down maybe a second and a half.
This is a slow task.
It takes them a long time to decide if it's living
or non-living.
The interesting thing is that the monolinguals and
the bilinguals are equivalent.
Furthermore, the bilinguals are faster than
the monolinguals for these newly learned German
words, both for cognates and non-cognates.
So, that suggests that the bilinguals are faster --
at least this group of bilinguals -- relative to
the monolinguals and then the question is, "Okay,
what's going on?"
They all show increased activity outside of
traditional languages for these newly learned words.
Not surprising that we would get other areas of
activity because this is a fairly difficult task.
It's not just learning the new words, but it's
actually deciding what they are; are they living
or non-living, which we thought was a pretty deep,
difficult task and judging by their reaction times,
for a young adult, these are really slow reaction
times, so, indeed, it was a difficult task for them.
And then we looked at the brain activity.
Brain activity, when we compared monolinguals to
bilinguals and then bilinguals to
monolinguals, remember the monolinguals are slower
and these are for German words in general, and then
one small comparison just for the cognates when we
compare monolinguals and bilinguals.
Our areas of the interior singular cortex, the
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, cod a [spelled
phonetically] supplementary motor area,
and these are areas generally thought to be
involved in cognitive control.
So, the interesting thing about this is that the
monolinguals are slower than the bilinguals, but
they're also showing increased activity in
areas involved in cognitive control when
they're processing these newly learned words.
When we compare the bilinguals to the
monolinguals, we find an increased area of activity
in the putamen, which is also thought to be
involved in control, though there is a debate
about is it cognitive control?
Is it motor control?
There's some studies that have found increased
activity in the putamen, for articulatory
type of processing.
So, again, it's subject to interpretation, but our
view is that, clearly, the type of control invoked by
bilinguals for these newly learned words is different
than the monolinguals.
And you can't quite appreciate how big this
chunk of it is, although maybe you do, but it is a
big chunk of putamen and it's bilateral.
Again, interesting that we get this [inaudible].
So, learning the vocabulary is difficult,
no doubt about that, and it doesn't matter what the
previous language experience is.
But the interesting thing is that these monolinguals
and bilinguals show differences in response to
these new words. Sorry.
And it suggests that, again -- and the
interpretation might be, "Okay why is it that the
monolinguals are different?
What made a -- maybe what are they doing?
And one interpretation we have is they may be using
some form of a more explicit semantic strategy
during early word learning and the bilinguals seem to
be using more motor based control, which is sort of
an interesting follow-up question, which is,
"What does that mean?
Why are they using more motor based control?"
And so, that could be nice to follow these studies up
and, sort of, figure out exactly what is it the
bilinguals are doing
and why is there this difference.
This kind of dove tailed into a second set of
studies, looking at genetics, language
history, and cognitive control.
The issue of language history is one that has,
no pun intended, a history.
It's been studied for many, many years.
The effect of essentially two, not competing but two
different factors like the age at which somebody
learns a second language and how proficient they
are at that second language.
And so, these two factors have been studied and
they've been present in the bilingual literature,
at least in terms of the bilingual brain for, I
want to say, over 100 years,
since the late 1800s.
Cognitive control came a little bit later in the
1920s, and that's the one that, again, has been
revived across several waves of looking at
switching, maybe a switching mechanism that's
used for cognitive control of sorts or the idea that
maybe there's more interference because
bilinguals have to inhibit one language to speak the
other and that's been studied across at least
two or three waves over the last 90 years or so.
And then, more recently people have begun to be
interested in genetics.
The genetics part was one that was surprising at the
beginning because my colleague, Kristin
Treebach [spelled phonetically], who's in
Frankfurt now, but at the time was in Heidelberg,
had done this really nice work looking at a
switching task comparing people who differ on Tack [phonetic sp]
1A polymorphism, which is
thought to be involved in the dopamine system
supportically and found that those who are
carriers of a certain variant or a certain snap,
as we call it, of the A1 plus, showed reduced
switching costs and those who didn't have this
particular variant actually showed slightly
increased, more significantly increased--
it wasn't a huge effect, but it was significant
increase in cortical areas involved in cognitive
control when doing a switching task.
So, this lead me to think about, well, what would
happen if we looked at
genetics and bilingualism as a possibility.
So, in a first preliminary study, we looked at
genotyping and bilinguals.
We wanted to see what would happen if we looked
at bilinguals at the University of Houston,
genotyped them for these different variants.
And so, I have a group here of 122
Spanish-English bilinguals, 58 English
monolinguals -- I wanted that number slightly
higher, but being one of the most diverse
universities in, certainly in the U.S, not the most
diverse but one of the most diverse -- it gets
hard to find monolinguals, actually, and the other
restriction we had was we wanted Caucasian
monolinguals because we wanted to make sure we
could replicate the proportions that had been
found previously in literature.
So, what you see here are groups, again, that differ
on their English age of acquisition, so, of
course, the monolinguals we put "not applicable."
Some people will put two as their age of
acquisition, which I think native language occurs
very, very early, typically developing
in populations.
For our Spanish-English bilinguals, sometime
around six years of age.
The proficiency for the monolinguals is higher in
English than the bilinguals.
That's, again, what we found in the past.
Proficiency in Spanish is marked here by -- we have
a socio-economic status which also differs across
our populations with Spanish-English bilinguals
having lower socio-economic status.
But the interesting thing that kind of stood out to
us was look at the proportion of those with a
1A1 -- I think it becomes more evident when we do it
as a figure -- is that the monolinguals are showing
what has typically been observed
in the literature.
About a third of the people have A1 plus;
they're carriers.
And, again, if these effects are restricted to
a switching task, they're significant effects but
they're not huge effects.
But it's interesting that we get this difference in
this gene and there are many different reasons
this could happen besides it having to do
with some switching.
We, in a paper, thought about it and discussed it.
Just said, "Well, one possibility is ethnicity
difference; we know that the distribution of genes
varies across ethnicity.
We don't have a lot of background studies to
look at that.
So, it's possible that that could be an
effect, right?
The other possibility is that, in fact, it has
something to do with possibly the bilinguals
who make it, right, to the University of Houston are
different than the monolinguals who make it
and this might be one -- not the only one -- one
gene that confers some advantage to this group.
We'd have to follow up by looking at students that
are high school or, you know, others that don't go
to college, whether in the general population and
that portion in the Hispanic bilingual
population looks more like this.
But it's interesting nonetheless.
So, what about language experience?
So, we have this data that we've collected now with
bilinguals looking at genetics, so the DRD2 gene,
looking at non-verbal task
switching, looking at a non-verbal inhibition
task, which I'll describe in a second, and then
English second language production.
And Kelly Vaughn, who was the head of the study and
who wrote it up grabbed a student in my lab, she set
up this figure to describe the relationship between
these things, and I'll walk through those now.
So -- sorry.
I can do them from here.
So, the non-verbal task was an action object
switching task.
So, in that task, what people have to do is, they
have to -- essentially, they're given a symbol at
the beginning of the task and are told to
track the color.
Yeah, in this case it's a shape/color task.
They have to track the color of a figure that's
presented on the screen one after the other, and
they're told track the color.
So, they do that for a while and then they're
given another symbol which asks them or tells them to
either continue tracking the color or to switch.
So, that's a switching task, although it's not a
switching task on every stimulus.
It's a switching task over time.
So, we call this a non-verbal switching task.
And in fact, it is, from what we can observe, not
related to language background.
Besides the switching, you know, how long it takes
them to switch, it's not related to anything that
has to do with language background.
Our non-verbal inhibition task is the thiamin task,
which has been used, again, by people in the
literature to look at the differences in bilinguals,
between bilinguals and monolinguals.
We chose it to look at, to what extent it might be
influenced by what brain activity would be
associated with it and then how it might be
influenced by either the genetic characteristics of
people or the language background.
And we found a relationship between
non-verbal inhibition and language background.
And then, finally, the English L2 production is
just [inaudible] inside the scanner where we asked
people to, out loud, produce the name
of the picture.
And so, what we get is this very complex
relationship between language background and
the age of acquisition of a language and their
language proficiency is related to English L2
production, which is when people are using this
task, that modifying activity in their
prefrontal gyros.
Language background also relates to the thiamin
task and the effect there.
The size of the thiamin effect and activity to
your singular cortex.
And non-verbal task switching relates to
activity in the anterior singular cortex and that,
actually, is related to the carrier status.
So, it seems that genes are sort of tracing out
one aspect of this cognitive control cortical
circuit, whereas language background is
independently affecting influencing
other parts of it.
So, this was just done to show the complexity of
language background, genetics, and
the tasks we use.
And so, going forward, our idea is to continue
looking at this complexity to see what determines the
nature of control and sort of give you my position on
the whole bilingual advantage idea.
The question is it's clear that lots of things affect
cognitive control.
Bilingualism may be one of them and then the question
is can we start to figure out which type, which
aspects of bilingualism may be influencing
cognitive control and what other factors may also be
influencing cognitive control.
So, this is a beginning at looking at those
types of studies.
The other thing I did want to talk about, which is
interesting, and this is work that we've
done with children.
So, we've been looking at the nature of [inaudible]
this is structural data.
Looking at the thickness of the left hemisphere,
the frontal middle gyros, right, more balanced than
unbalanced children relative to monolinguals.
And what we find, which is interesting -- this is a
group of children that are, as I said earlier,
they're sequential bilingual, so they've
learned Spanish first and they're now children in
school learning English.
And the interesting thing is that we see this
difference in the middle frontal gyros, which is
thought to be a control area.
And initially the way we started these studies, was
to actually look at was listening to single
actually nonsense syllables, so it was an
idea to look at phenology.
We began to observe lots of use of control in tasks
that involved phenology, you know, nonsense task
[unintelligible].
They weren't lexical.
They weren't word tasks.
And this is the structural data from these children
showing that those children who show balanced
and unbalanced proficiency have differences in the
thickness and it appears that the unbalanced group
looks more like the monolingual group in terms
of that thickness than the balanced group.
Now, there could be lots of reasons for this.
It could be experience, it could be -- it also turns
out that balanced and unbalanced, interestingly,
also goes along with rated accent in English.
So, the suggestion is that, you know, is it
experience that's driving children to be more
balanced and hence their brain is changing or are
their brains slightly different to be able to
adapt to a second language more easily and that's
reflected in them becoming more balanced
and unbalanced.
That's sort of an open question.
We don't really know.
We can't address that with this data, but it's
interesting that we're finding this difference in
children, child bilinguals.
We also find a difference -- and you might remember
sometime here, I talked about the [inaudible] and
bilingual showing more activity in the putamen
when they were processing those newly learned
[inaudible] compared to monolinguals.
And the putamen popped back up for us, actually
popped up a couple of times and in the
literature as well, when we looked at the balanced
and unbalanced these are just the bilinguals, and
if we look at the difference between first
and second language proficiency, the putamen
shows the difference in its cortical structure
when we compare balanced to unbalanced.
And the argument about what the putamen does is
that it's involved in -- not what it does, what
it's involved in is in articulatory or motor
types of processing, so that suggests that, in
terms of the structure, our children that are
balanced and unbalanced may be showing a
difference already at a young age.
So, that's an interesting further thing that we
could investigate.
And so, I wanted to kind of end with this idea of,
"Why are bilinguals different?"
I didn't want to quite overwhelm people with lots
of data.
I wanted to give time for people to ask questions.
But, you know, with this question, does
bilingualism train the brain?
Is it the case that, you know, there is some effect
on cognitive control from the fact that bilinguals
use two languages?
And one aspect that we've begun to look at is
actually thinking about this in terms of the type
of tasks, so, if you recall, the task that I
presented with learning new words in German was a
vocabulary learning task, but it turns out that
several people have started looking at the
learning of new rules.
For example, given two stimuli and asked to do
some set of operations on them, so two numbers.
And they found [unintelligible] run a
series of studies where they've actually looked at
bilinguals having to do a new task.
They're trained on certain tasks and then they've
practiced those and when they get in the scanner
they're actually told to do something different,
wouldn't you know.
So, it may be something like "Add them and divide
by two" and then they get into the scanner and they
do something like "Subtract them and
multiply by two."
So, what happens is that, it turns out the
bilinguals, they're different.
They're better at these tasks and they show
differential brain activity in subcortical
regions involved in cognitive control.
So, one additional hypothesis we're
entertaining is, and [unintelligible] and I
have been talking about this is, how can we extend
this idea of, you know, novel learning as a
possible way to think about it and Andres Toco [phonetic sp]
has a really nice model that
comes out of really a different literature, the
literature looking at, essentially, from
computational neuroscience models of the basal
ganglia and what it handles.
And so, in that literature, what happened
is they talk about learning the new rules and
the idea we're pursuing is we could think of
bilingualism as learning new rules or different
rules in some ways or having to learn two
different rules, at the very least, and there is
some data suggesting some literature-- works
suggesting that very early in development, the basal
ganglia may be involved in having to deal with
competing sound systems.
So, maybe that's one source of a possible
bilingual advantage, if you want to look at
learning new rules as a possible way to explore
that further and in the future hopefully do more
computationally based types of models.
Andres Toco is the one who does the computationally
based models, so it's not my area, I'm more of an
experimentalist, but it would be nice to start to
think about it.
One thing he did tell me in a conversation was
that, in his models, when he does these
computational models, they don't really
think about language.
Now, obviously, we do as humans, but the models
don't seem to have a code.
You almost have to tell the model that these are
different languages because, in some of his
models, surprisingly, it's not evident to the model
that these are two different languages.
So, that's an interesting aside from that, but the
point is, again, trying to really understand what it
is, what does bilingualism really bring, what kind of
experiences happen because of bilingualism.
How might that lead to a difference in the brain?
And then I think, once we develop that, we can,
perhaps, think about how that relates to a
bilingual advantage.
So, there are a couple of steps here that we need
to get through.
There's always a question of,
"What's happening different?"
Our modeling looks different than
bilingual's.
What's another dimension?
You know, if I show you my data, obviously, possibly
genetics, but there's also socio-economic status.
And I think that's why, in Manolo Carreira's studies
in the Basque country are right because he prepared
Basque Spanish bilinguals to Spanish monolinguals,
obviously in other parts of Spain.
And that's for all these things.
So, I think his view is that there is no bilingual
advantage, right, but it's something else.
Is it FDS?
Is it culture?
Could it be genetics?
I mean, that's an open question but we know that
things affect control, and so one fallback is, "Well,
what things affect control?"
"How big is the bilingual affect, if it exists?"
And finally, of course, is individual
[unintelligible] and what we've been trying to--
what we've been thinking about is individual
variability at the language history level,
but also individual variability now thinking
about DRD2 that I presented some data on
today, but also other genes, right, so COMT
is another gene that's
involved in cognitive control.
And, of course, we can also think about going
beyond the cognitive control domain to other
domains like logical processing, language
processing, there's more and more interest now,
even in looking at genetics for second
language, but, of course, these studies require a
considerable-- you need large sample sizes for
some of these genetic effects.
They're not huge, so you need to either control
your studies really well or you need to expand the
size of your population, your number of subjects
you have, to see the effects.
So, I think that there's a lot to do and it's a very
exciting time but at times it's also a bit
overwhelming in terms of how to make sense of all
these different factors that are playing a role in
a very intricate and interesting way.
And then I just wanted to just thank
those who helped out.
Of course, as mentioned earlier NIH, the funding
that we received, we owe a lot to also Alexander
Humboldt, it was really nice that I could spend a
year in Kristin Treebach's lab, learning more about
control and actually being in a lab that didn't do
language at all, definitely
no bilingualism.
A little bit of language, but definitely
no bilingualism.
And then various people who have helped out for
research; graduate students, collaborators,
and also to those founders in the neuropsychology
literature many years ago that thought about what
factors might affect the bilingual brain.
Thank you.
Well, I guess it's open to questions.
Male Speaker: [inaudible] everybody so you can hear.
Can you hear me?
There's probably a lot of other [inaudible].
So, mute everyone so that I can [inaudible] for
Arturo in terms of asking questions.
Female Speaker: Are allowed to ask a question
by phone or should we type it?
Male Speaker: If you type it in the chat and
everybody would mute, that would be great.
We had to unmute everyone in order to be able for me
to speak so we could check the -- Arturo,
can you hear me okay?
Arturo Hernandez: Yes.
Male Speaker: Okay, good. Perfect.
So, we only have a couple that have come in.
One is, [inaudible] the value of studying and
mastering a second language, do you think
they are exaggerating their claim of cognitive
benefits to a broad audience outside the
research community?
Arturo Hernandez: So, I guess my question would
be, "Who's they?"
[laughs].
Is it the press?
Is it the researchers?
I don't hear anything.
Can you guys hear me?
Female Speaker: I was the one who
asked the question.
I clarified it in the chat.
Male Speaker: Okay, look at it.
Female Speaker: I was referring to the
advocates. Advocates.
Arturo Hernandez: Ye what about them?
Male Speaker: Arturo, can you hear that and answer?
Arturo Hernandez: I heard advocates.
Male Speaker: Yeah, so --
Arturo Hernandez: [inaudible]
Male Speaker: [inaudible] asking about the advocates
in the value of studying and mastering
a second language.
Do you think they're exaggerating their claims
about the cognitive benefits?
Arturo Hernandez: Okay, so I'll just
interpret by "advocates."
I don't know if exaggeration would be
the right word.
I think it might have been a misrepresentation about
how big the effect was.
[inaudible] but I don't know that it's
been exaggerated.
And the other thing that I think that we have to be
careful about is, you know, it's hard to
differentiate now between what's said in the media
and what's printed in articles.
So, certainly the media, I think there was a period
there where was -- and I certainly felt it, where a
lot of people felt that bilingual advantage became
a really hot topic.
Everybody was talking about it and there was a
buzz around that idea.
That's true.
Again, was it exaggerated
in the published literature?
My sense is the data were there, they were
presented, but I don't have the sense that they
were exaggerated.
I think it's when it became partly taken on by
the media and by very eager students, some of
whom I spoke to, and I presented last year in
Germany, and one of the students said she came to
graduate school all excited about this idea
and found nothing, right?
I don't know that it was the proponents themselves
that exaggerated or rather that it took on a
life of its own.
But certainly, I mean, there's a lot of questions
about exactly what it is.
That's where I'll leave it at.
Was it exaggerated?
You know, it was a very hot topic, let's just
put it that way.
And then, it garnered a lot of intrigue.
It became much more complicated when we
actually found [inaudible].
Male Speaker: Arturo, do you [inaudible].
The next question -- those of you on the phone, if
you would mute, that would be great, because we can't
talk without you being muted.
Arturo, I think a good question to [inaudible]
and how has [inaudible] been a part of research
on bilingualism?
Has the experience by [inaudible] the effects
of bilingualism?
Arturo Hernandez: You cut out there for a second.
Can you repeat the question?
Male Speaker: So, there's a question about
language and culture.
[inaudible] Let me just stop there [inaudible].
Arturo Hernandez: Language and culture?
Male Speaker: Yeah.
Unfortunately, we're not getting everybody to mute
on their end and we can't talk to you unless we
unmute everyone.
Let me try that one more time.
Can language be compounded by culture?
How has bicultural identity been a part of
research on bilingualism?
Arturo Hernandez: Yeah, I mean, [inaudible] I think
it might be one of the factors that, on the one
hand, very hard to operationalize exactly
what culture is from a
more biological point of view.
But I think it would be not too intelligent to say
that they're not somehow related strongly and that
culture, in some ways, is a prime or collection of
things that fit into certain linguistic labels
that are associated with the language.
So, I would say yes.
I say it's out of my area of research and might be
one of those things we can do in the future.
I think it is, definitely.
A very trick one to do [inaudible].
Male Speaker: Right.
Arturo, since we're having difficulty hearing on our
end, we're sending you the questions
via the chat room.
You should have one up on your chat, on your screen.
Arturo Hernandez: I'm sharing my screen, should
I stop sharing it?
Male Speaker: It doesn't matter if you stop
sharing or not.
Go to chat up in the top right.
You should be [inaudible].
Arturo Hernandez: To g back to [inaudible]
Male Speaker: Right.
We can also send it via email.
Arturo Hernandez: So, I have a full screen view
but there I don't see it.
Oh, there we go, chat.
Okay. Alright.
So, here's the question.
"We are studying traumatic brain injury in military
in both English and
Spanish-English native speaking.
We are concerned about testing for traumatic
brain injuries giving the English test to native
Spanish speakers, though they also speak English.
Do you have an opinion on this matter?
So, it's traumatic brain injury, English only and
Spanish natives, English speaking, using English
cognitive testing on native Spanish speakers,
so they also speak English.
Yeah, I would think that, certainly, your concern is
well warranted.
Yeah, definitely I would look to test them
in both languages.
Obviously, you must also be also using non-verbal
tests, so I think, in that sense, that it makes sense
to look at both languages for sure.
Especially, because people can vary a lot in language
and, of course, you don't know the relationship
between, so let's just give a hypothetical.
So, it could be that someone speaks English
quite well, but it's not their dominant language,
so when they suffer traumatic brain injury,
because English requires them to use more cognitive
control because it's the less proficient language,
that's an idea that's been studied a lot by various
different researchers, then what might happen is
that English would actually show a bigger
decrement than Spanish.
So, that's one possibility that would allow you
to see it more.
I definitely think that you would have to look at
both languages.
I'm just trying to make sure I haven't
missed any questions.
Okay, okay.
Thank you, you're welcome.
So, I'm just going to start from the bottom.
Is there better cognitive reserve in bilingual?
So, that's a very interesting question.
I don't know.
I actually honestly cannot tell you the answer
to that question.
There are data that support that point of
view, there are other data that don't, I'm thinking
about the older adult literature that don't
show cognitive reserve.
And there's a whole tricky, very difficult
question to figure out, so I'll give you an example.
Many years ago, we did aging work with young and
older adult bilingual.
Young meaning college-aged and one of the criticisms
of the study was that we hadn't matched our older
adult bilinguals to our young adult bilinguals.
That's because our older adult bilinguals hadn't
finished high school.
What I wrote back in the response to the review
was, "Well, the problem is that these are
Spanish-English bilinguals that are in their 70s --
this is in the 90s, they had schooling, most
likely, before the civil rights movement.
So how do we know that high school for them is
not actually a very high level of education
relative to bilinguals in the 90s where they were
much more likely to have high school
and then college.
So, I think there's always the issue of sampling and
matching that is tricky with bilinguals.
I can tell you personally, that everything that I
read about, having to mentally juggle two
languages, the effect of, you know -- I spent a year
immersed in German, and the effects that it
had on my English.
As Judy [unintelligible] very nicely looking at the
effect of the second language on the person
versus the fourth language on the other three, there
is, clearly, some kind of training effect.
It makes a difference in how we process the world.
The question I always ask myself is, "Am I different
somehow already from someone who already speaks
one language or two languages?
Could I speak four?"
You know, this is always a tricky question, but I
want to believe that there is a cognitive reserve and
that bilingualism has some advantage and
does train the brain.
The question is still kind of open as to
how it does that.
Hopefully I answered your question.
But I don't really know.
I wish I could give you a more definitive
answer there. Okay.
You're welcome.
There was a question about reading right to left
versus left to right and I'm sure there's data on
that but I'm not a literacy person, so I'm
going to differ on that question.
What would be the harm in moving Spaniards from the
Hispanic category and limiting Hispanic to those
whose lineage are from Latin America?
The harm, in terms of comparing, I think we do
always have to be very careful about where, and
certainly in terms of genetic studies, we know
that people who originate from Mexico and Central
America tend to be a 50/50 European versus indigenous
ancestry, Native American ancestry and those from
Spain would be different.
Those from Argentina would be different, so I think
that we do have to be careful about the origins
of our populations and what inferences we want to
make, should be careful really to know what our
population is and know it well.
Brain injury question. Spaniards.
Somebody had a question about balanced and
unbalanced.
So, these were children.
There were some children who were better in Spanish
than English in terms of their proficiency was
better at Spanish than English and those who were
equal at Spanish and English and that
was the difference.
Balanced were equal in Spanish and English.
Unbalanced was better in Spanish than English.
So, we did take that as possibly indicating that
they're struggling to learn English more rapidly
and we saw differences in the middle frontal gyros
for that group.
Okay, I think I'm caught up with questions.
Well, there was one about [inaudible].
One question was about the [inaudible] cognitive
ability between monolinguals and
bilinguals.
We haven't actually done monolingual bilingual
comparisons, so when we did our aging work, we
actually looked only
at U to UC [phonetic sp].
I'll interpret it more generally.
In terms of our work, specifically, we only
looked at young bilingual's, college-aged
and older adults, not at monolingual older adults
versus bilingual older adults.
There is data suggesting that there are differences
in cognitive control, but there's also data, for
example, when we look at Manolo Carreiras' stuff,
it's older adults and there are not differences
in certain groups.
One of the hypotheses that we have that we're
pursuing is possibly looking at this new
rule learning idea.
As one possibility and the models that are developed,
computational neuroscience models, looking at things
like the stroop task or the thiamin task.
The stroop task, the flanker task is that they
seem to, in these computational neuroscience
models have less complex cognitive control circuits
when they're modeled and the ones that require more
complex cognitive control circuits, those are
associated with things like learning new rules.
There's also things like reinforcement type
learning where some people seem to learn in different
ways, so there's that question of, "Are there
higher orders of cognitive control and one day are we
going to approach that by looking at new rules as a
possible distinguisher between monolinguals
and bilinguals?"
We're just at the beginning with that one.
Male Speaker: Great.
Arturo, I'm going to open the line back up
so I can talk.
That always produces a bit of a tower of Babel.
I want to thank you for taking the time today to
present and for all the questions and all the
people who are on.
We had 179 registrants, so it was a nice group.
I'll let everyone know that the recording of this
will be available in about a month.
I also want to thank [inaudible] for
coordinating this and all the rest of their
director's seminars -- webinars over the
course of the year.
Our next presentation will be February 21st with
Sarah Mormon, who is one of our early stage
investigator paper awardees last year.
She'll be presenting February 21st.
With that, I want to thank all of you for
participating today.
Arturo, thank you again.
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