Papers from the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology Conferences
Publication Date
2013
Abstract
The current study investigated the developmental trajectory of 124 English-Chinese Singaporean bilinguals (41 6-9-year-olds, 44 18-26-year-olds, and 39 55-79-year-olds) with the Standard (SD), Total Change (TC), Positive Priming (PP), and Negative Priming (NP) versions of the Computerized Dimensional Change Card Sort task. Tasks were administrated in either English or Chinese. Additionally, participants were tested with both English and Chinese versions of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Separate curve fitting indicated that significant quadratic trends appeared in the local switch costs for accuracy only in the SD and the PP versions. Children had significantly larger local switch costs in all the versions compared to young adults and elderly adults, who had similar local switch costs. These findings suggest that bilingualism may slow down the decay of information maintaining, updating, disinhibition, and task set integration in elderly adults. Results imply that bilingual advantage may accumulate through childhood, and be preserved in late adulthood.
ScholarWorks Citation
Qu, L., Low, J. J. W., Chong, P. S., Lim, D. W. L., & Keren-Happuch, F. F. E. (2013). Task switching in English-Chinese bilinguals: A life span approach. In Y. Kashima, E. S. Kashima, & R. Beatson (Eds.), Steering the cultural dynamics: Selected papers from the 2010 Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. https://doi.org/10.4087/HEIZ7355
