Password to the Zoominar is required; please email José Alemán Bañón:

jose.aleman.banon@biling.su.se

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Much research in the past few decades shows that bilingual experience is linked to adaptations in brain structure, function, and domain-general cognition, particularly the executive functions. The specificity of these bilingual experience-induced neurocognitive effects, however, remains relatively poorly understood and in some cases has been the subject of debate in recent years, in large part due to variability of findings across studies. A growing body of research has aimed to understand the specificity and trajectory of neurocognitive effects of specific bilingual experience-based factors (e.g., duration of bilingual experience, intensity or diversity of language use, etc.) across the adult lifespan. In this talk, I will discuss a recently proposed theoretical model, the Unified Bilingual Experience Trajectories (UBET) framework (DeLuca et al., 2020) that attempts to map the trajectory of neural and cognitive adaptations to distinct bilingual experiences, and some of my recent empirical work which addresses some of the predictions (structural, functional, and cognitive) of this model. I close with a discussion of some potential directions for future research in this domain. 

Biography

Vincent DeLuca received his PhD from the University of Reading (UK) in 2018. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham (UK) on an ESRC project examining effects of individual differences in bilingual experience on neurocognitive outcomes. He is now an associate professor in the Neurocognition of Bilingualism and co-director of the Psycholinguistics of Language Representation (PoLaR) lab in the AcqVa Aurora Centre at UiT-The Arctic University of Norway. 

Vincent DeLuca

About the Higher seminar in Research on Bilingualism