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Bilingualism

Do older adults and bilinguals organise words by context more?

Johns BT, Sheppard CL, Jones MN, et al. · Frontiers in psychology · 2016

Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC

A measure of how varied a word's contexts are explained word recognition speed best in everyone, but especially in older adults and bilinguals.

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Study at a glance

Design
Cross-sectional — 2 (age) x 2 (monolingual/bilingual) group comparison on a lexical decision task, with regression of item RTs on corpus-derived word frequency, contextual diversity and semantic diversity (SDM) measures
N
N=86 · Four groups: young monolinguals (21), young bilinguals (28), older monolinguals (16), older bilinguals (21); a larger existing English Lexicon Project dataset was also reanalysed
Population
English monolingual and English-French bilingual adults aged 18-30 or 65+ in the Ottawa-Gatineau region, Canada
Outcome
Lexical decision reaction times and the unique variance in them explained by word frequency, contextual diversity and semantic diversity

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Key findings

Older adults responded more slowly than younger adults, and young bilinguals were slower than young monolinguals, replicating standard findings. Semantic diversity explained the most unique variance in every group and corpus, while raw frequency added little. The variance explained by semantic diversity rose in a consistent order: young monolinguals, then young bilinguals and older monolinguals, then older bilinguals, for whom it was roughly double.

Methodology

Young and older adults who were either English monolinguals or English-French bilinguals decided as quickly as possible whether letter strings were real English words. The researchers then asked how well three corpus-based measures of each word's 'strength' predicted response times: raw word frequency, the number of documents a word appears in (contextual diversity), and a semantic distinctiveness model that weights contexts by how different they are (semantic diversity). They repeated the modelling across five different text corpora.

Limitations

The groups were small (as few as 16 older monolinguals) and not randomly assigned, so age and bilingualism may be confounded with education or other differences. Only 150 real words were used, so item-level regressions rest on a limited set. The model shows that older adults and bilinguals rely more on contextual diversity, but the authors note it gives no mechanism for how that information is used during word retrieval. Bilingual proficiency was self-reported.

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