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Attention and Bilingual Code-switching
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Description: Attention is the cognitive system that enables people to successfully maintain focus, orient to sensory input, and gather information over time (Posner & Petersen, 1990). Attention is critical to successful language processing: When attention lapses, people fail to encode or retain key information (Boudewyn & Carter, 2018). In this study we are investigating if attention is modulated when a bilingual listener hears a code-switch—a switch from one language to another mid-utterance. The project addresses the questions: Does encountering code-switches increase attention? And, is information presented in a code-switched context remembered better than information presented in a single-language context? Past research suggests that being in a dual language context or comprehending a code-switch can improve people’s performance on a subsequent task by helping them ignore distractions (Adler et al., 2020; Wu & Thierry, 2013). Here, we ask whether these past reports of benefits from mixed language contexts on a millisecond timescale extends to benefits in attention and memory more broadly on a larger timescale. We first conducted an English-only validation study with English monolinguals to ensure the story listening and attention probe method worked as expected in a remote online experiment. The OSF project (pre-registration, materials, and data) for that initial English-only validation study can be found here: https://osf.io/g92at/ The project on this OSF page involves two experiments: -Experiment 1: Spanish-English bilinguals listened to two stories--one with code-switches and one in a single-language (English only). This was pre-registered. -Experiment 2: English monolinguals listened to two stories--one with code-switches and one in a single-language (English only).
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