Relationship between Language Dominance and Stimulus-Stimulus or Stimulus-Response Inhibition in Uyghur-Chinese Bilinguals with an Investigation of Speed-Accuracy Trade-Offs

Abstract

The effect of bilingualism on inhibition control is increasingly under ongoing exploration. The present study primarily investigated the effect of within bilingual factors (i.e., dominance types of Uyghur-Chinese bilinguals) on a Stimulus-Stimulus task (Flanker) and a Stimulus-Response task (Simon). We also compared the bilinguals' performance on each type of cognitive control task in respect to a possible trade-off between speed and accuracy. The findings showed no explicit differences on performance in response time or accuracy among balanced, L1-dominant and L2-dominant bilinguals but balanced bilinguals demonstrated a significant speed-accuracy trade-off in the overall context switching between non-conflict and conflict trials in both cognitive control tasks where monitoring process is highly demanded. Additionally, all bilinguals across all language dominance types showed a trade-off strategy in inhibition during a Stimulus-Stimulus conflict (flanker task). This evidence indicates that the differences of within bilinguals in cognitive control could lie in the monitoring process, while for all bilinguals, inhibition during a Stimulus-Stimulus conflict could be a major component in the mechanism of bilingual language processing.

Features of Behaviorism in Second Language Acquisition (SLA): An Empirical Excerpt from Applied Linguistics View

“…In truth, stimulusresponse as one of the features of behaviorism has paved the way for the grammatical competence and reading prowess of the participants. This involves question-answer, reading & speaking drills, infused with written activities as prelude to L2 acquisition (Holland, 2008;Nazir, 2018;Wu et. al.…”

Individual Variation and the Bilingual Advantage—Factors that Modulate the Effect of Bilingualism on Cognitive Control and Cognitive Reserve

“…In their original study, Wu and colleagues [28] investigated the effect of bilingualism on inhibition control in 93 Uyghur-Chinese bilingual young adults. Thirty-one participants were Uyghur first language (L1) dominant, 31 participants were Chinese L2 dominant, and 31 participants were Uyghur-Chinese balanced (meaning individuals had equal proficiency in both the native language and the L2).…”

“…A second main finding of their study was that regardless of the degrees of bilingual proficiency, the underlying mechanism of bilingual language inhibitory control depended, to a large extent, on the type of stimulus-stimulus conflict resolution that was present in both language recognition and production processes. Wu and colleagues [28] concluded that exposure to different sociolinguistic contexts where different types of inhibition are induced, such as stimulus-stimulus or stimulus-response conflict, may lead to various patterns in strategic task tendencies in bilingual cognitive processing.…”

“…In contrast to the five original studies on the relation between bilingualism and cognitive control in which adults were investigated [22,25,28,31,34], Haft and colleagues [36] investigated a group of young children. They were interested in the possible associations between bilingualism and cognitive flexibility-a relationship that has shown mixed findings in prior literature [37,38].…”

An intricate relationship between executive function and second‐language ability in a cohort of Uyghur‐Chinese bilingual children

“…Uyghur is an agglutinative language with the feature of morphological changes, and its syntactic order is subject‐object‐verb. In contrast, a Chinese morpheme has no inflection, and its grammatical order is subject–verb‐object (Wu & Lochtman, 2019). In addition, nouns and verbs in the Uyghur language can be mutually transformed by changes in form, but nouns and verbs in the Chinese language cannot be mutually transformed by directly changing the forms (Xi et al., 2017).…”