This study was designed and conducted by Nick Rendell at Birkbeck University. The study focused on how language has contributed to cognitive development looking at both bilingual and monolingual people. Can we find a relationship between the levels of bilingual speech production/comprehension and task switching ability?
Executive functions are used when people listen and speak especially by bilingual people who need to control which of language they use or switch when moving from one language to another. 98 Birkbeck second year psychology students took part in this experiment. Participants were presented by bilingual questionnaire and later on completed a 10 minutes task which compromised of 6 experimental …show more content…
Previous studies on language and executive processing on bilingual people, do indicate that they have a better cognitive reserve compared to monolingual people. This may be due to the fact that they speak more than one language and have high control during bilingual processing and increased cognitive reserve, respectively. Studies on switching task paradigm by (Kessler and Meiran (2010, Experiment 1, “No load condition” the study involved selection of the correct language at a given time, which points towards to bilingual having advantage on task switching paradigms is directly demonstrating the process underpinning cognitive reserve. Language production and comprehension appear to require a degree of …show more content…
Bilingual people have the advantage of shifting around and - may provide a clue as to the nature of cognitive reserve in bilinguals, believed that bilingual people are more adept at executive processing tasks. A study by Simon & Rudell (1967). Participanats were expected to respond to the objects shapes and colour of objects , using "left" and "right" . The objects were randomly