Abstract
To adapt to their more varied and unpredictable (language) environments, infants from bilingual homes may gather more information (sample more of their environment) by shifting their visual attention more frequently. However, it is not known whether this early adaptation is age-specific or lasts into adulthood. If the latter, we would expect to observe it in adults who acquired their second language early, not late, in life. Here we show that early bilingual adults are faster at disengaging attention to shift attention, and at noticing changes between visual stimuli, than late bilingual adults. In one experiment, participants were presented with the same two visual stimuli; one changed (almost imperceptibly), the other remained the same. Initially, participants looked at both stimuli equally; eventually, they fixated more on the changing stimulus. This shift in looking occurred in the early but not late bilinguals. It suggests that cognitive processes adapt to early bilingual experiences.
Highlights
To adapt to their more varied and unpredictable environments, infants from bilingual homes may gather more information by shifting their visual attention more frequently
This is consistent with the results of our previous study10 which found that infants from bilingual homes disengage attention faster from one stimulus and switch attention more frequently between stimuli than infants from monolingual homes
The aim of the present study was to ascertain whether the early adaptations we found in infants10 could be found in adults
Summary
To adapt to their more varied and unpredictable (language) environments, infants from bilingual homes may gather more information (sample more of their environment) by shifting their visual attention more frequently It is not known whether this early adaptation is age-specific or lasts into adulthood. Because the bilingual environment may be more varied and less predictable than the monolingual environment (see Ref. for discussion), we hypothesised that infants from bilingual homes would switch attention between visual stimuli more frequently, and more rapidly disengage attention from one stimulus in order to shift it to another, than infants from monolingual homes. If we should be looking for adaptations to particular sets of constraints, rather than searching for bilingual ‘advantages’ per se, it raises the question of whether the adaptations we found in early development (rapid attentional disengagement and more frequent attention-switching) are age-specific or persist through to adulthood. We wanted to compare bilingual adults who (like the infants in10) had been exposed to two or more languages from an early age with bilingual adults who had learned their second language much later in life
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