Individual Differences in Executive Function Modulate Bilingual Between-Language Activation during Reading in Healthy Older Adults: Evidence from Eye-tracking

摘要

Older adults have special difficulty resolving lexical ambiguity {minute - small/unit of time) during language understanding, an issue potentially caused by age-related decline in executive function (Dagerman, MacDonald & Harm, 2006). These linguistic challenges may be even greater for bilingual older adults who face both within-and between-language ambiguity (four - oven in French vs. a digit in English) (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002). However, benefits in executive function brought about by life-long bilingualism may counter any age-related declines in bilingual lexical ambiguity resolution (Bialystok, Craik & Freedman, 2007). Here, we investigate two questions about bilingual language in older adults. First, do older adults show greater difficulty in resolving between-language lexical ambiguity compared to younger bilinguals? Second, do individual differences in executive function (inhibition or working memory) predict between-language lexical ambiguity resolution performance in older adults?