Verbal Fluency and Repetition Skills in Healthy Older Spanish-English Bilinguals

Abstract

The influence of bilingualism on cognitive test performance in older adults has received limited attention in the neuropsychology literature. The aim of this study was to examine the impact of bilingualism on verbal fluency and repetition tests in older Hispanic bilinguals. Eighty-two right-handed participants (28 men and 54 women) with a mean age of 61.76 years (SD = 9.30; range = 50-84) and a mean educational level of 14.8 years (SD = 3.6; range 2-23) were selected. Forty-five of the participants were English monolinguals, 18 were Spanish monolinguals, and 19 were Spanish-English bilinguals. Verbal fluency was tested by electing a verbal description of a picture and by asking participants to generate words within phonemic and semantic categories. Repetition was tested using a sentence-repetition test. The bilinguals' test scores were compared to English monolinguals' and Spanish monolinguals' test scores. Results demonstrated equal performance of bilingual and monolingual participants in all tests except that of semantic verbal fluency. Bilinguals who learned English before age 12 performed significantly better on the English repetition test and produced a higher number of words in the description of a picture than the bilinguals who learned English after age 12. Variables such as task demands, language interference, linguistic mode, and level of bilingualism are addressed in the Discussion section.

The bilingual effect on Boston Naming Test performance

“…Bilingualism also incurs some nonlinguistic processing advantages (e.g., bilingualism protects against age-related decline in cognitive control; Bialystok et al, 2004). However, bilingualism also entails some processing costs, including reduced verbal fluency scores (Gollan et al, 2002;Rosselli et al, 2000) and lower BNT scores (Roberts et al, 2002). The current study suggests that older adults' naming skills are similarly affected by bilingualism as younger adults (Kohnert et al, 1998) and build on previously reported bilingual effects by suggesting that there is no "magic point" at which speakers become bilingual.…”

Bilingualism affects picture naming but not picture classification

“…In one study, college-aged Spanish-English bilinguals produced significantly fewer correct responses in 9 of 12 semantic categories (with trends in the same direction in 2 of the 3 remaining categories) and 6 of 10 letter categories, and the difference between participant groups was larger and more robust on semantic categories (Gollan, Montoya, & Werner, 2002). Similarly, in a study of healthy older adults, Spanish-English bilinguals produced fewer correct responses, relative to monolinguals, in 2 semantic, but not in 2 letter, categories that were tested (only 4 categories total were tested in this study; Rosselli et al, 2000). As was described earlier regarding increased TOT rates in bilinguals, the lower verbal fluency scores in both studies could not be attributed solely to language dominance; bilinguals produced fewer correct responses even when they were tested exclusively in their dominant language.…”

More use almost always means a smaller frequency effect: Aging, bilingualism, and the weaker links hypothesis☆

“…However, evidence suggests that maintaining more than one language in a single cognitive system introduces some subtle but significant processing costs. When compared to their monolingual peers, bilinguals have more tip-of-the-tongue or TOT retrieval failures (Gollan & Acenas, 2004;Gollan, Bonanni, & Montoya, 2005;Gollan & Silverberg, 2001, but see Gollan & Brown, 2006), have reduced category fluency (Gollan, Montoya, & Werner, 2002;Portocarrero, Burright, & Donovick, 2007;Rosselli et al, 2000), name pictures more slowly (Gollan, Montoya, Fennema-Notestine, & Morris, 2005), and name fewer pictures correctly on standardized naming tests such as the Boston Naming Test (Kohnert, Hernandez, & Bates, 1998;Roberts, Garcia, Desrochers, & Hernandez, 2002;Gollan, Fennema-Notestine, Montoya, & Jernigan, 2007). Importantly, bilingual naming disadvantages were found even when bilinguals were tested exclusively in their dominant language (e.g., Gollan & Acenas, 2004;, and more recently in bilinguals who are dominant in their first-learned language (Ivanova & Costa, in press; many of the bilinguals in the studies by Gollan et al, were dominant in their secondlearned language).…”