Sarah E. Grey, Ph.D. - US grants

This dissertation project tests whether adults who are bilingual (who learned two languages as children) are better at learning a foreign language than are monolingual adults. Previous research suggests that bilinguals have an advantage over monolinguals at some tasks, including creative thinking and problem solving. Recently, researchers have also claimed that bilinguals are better than monolinguals at learning another language, but this hypothesis has not yet been tested systematically.

This project will examine this hypothesized advantage by having bilingual adults learn a language that they don't already know--one that is, in fact, an artificial language, which by design they could not already have been exposed to--and comparing their performance to that of monolingual adults under the same learning conditions. The proficiency that participants attain in the language, as well as measures of their brain activity while they process the language, will be tested at two points, once early on during learning (at low proficiency) and once at the end of training (at high proficiency). The project will also evaluate the effect of the context in which the artificial language is acquired by comparing learning in a classroom to learning in an immersion context. Half of the bilingual participants will train under classroom-like conditions; whereas the second half of this group will receive training under immersion-like conditions. The corresponding data for the monolingual group, which has already been collected, indicates that by the time monolingual learners reach high proficiency, their brain patterns look similar to those of native speakers of most languages, particularly for those who underwent immersion-like training. This suggests that monolingual foreign language learners can indeed become like native speakers in how their brains learn and process the language. The data from bilinguals will be collected and compared to the data from monolinguals. The hypothesized bilingual advantage in acquiring new languages predicts that the bilingual participants will be faster and more accurate than the monolinguals in learning the artificial language. It also predicts that their brain patterns will be even more similar to patterns that are typically found when native speakers process sentences in their own first language.

Because learning foreign languages makes an important contribution to the lives of many people the world over in today's global economy, and because proficiency in foreign languages is also critical to the security needs of the government, findings from this project may have broader consequences for education, policy and security.