SITI APIAH YUSTIANI 1111014000070 VB

Title : Bilingualism, Aging, and Cognitive Control: Evidence From the Simon Task

Author(s) : Ellen Bialystok, Fergus I. M. Craik, Raymond Klein, Mythili Viswanathan

Publisher : American Psychological Association

Date of Published: 2004 Number of Words : 11.366

List: 75

This article refers to the evidence that there is an existing effect of bilingualism on cognitive processing (Groot & Kroll,1997, and Harris, 1992). Then the question has never been, whether these effects persist over the life span and continue to influence the changes in cognitive processing in bilingual older adults. The authors stated that it is important to determine the effects of bilingualism on cognitive processing accurately and the way in which the effects are organized by aging. The research tried to determine whether the bilingual advantage persists for adult and whether the bilingualism decreases the negative effects of aging on cognitive control in older adults.

This research conducted in 3 studies. The first study was to investigate the possibility of the effects of adult aging ang language group on the simon task, the method is providing 40 participants divided into two language groups and two age groups, in each groups the half participants are monolingual and the others are bilingual. The result of the first study was all participants were comparable on measures of verbal and spatial intelligence, but the bilinguals were consistently faster in responding to the simon task. The second study was using the first method with different task and isntrument. The result of the second study bilinguals achieved faster response times rhan did monoliguals of the same age. The third study was using 20 participant, half French-English and half English living in the same canadian community. The result of the third study is monolingual and bilingual adults who scored equivalently on a set of background measures examining working memory and cognitive level differed in their performance on the Simon task.

The authors put themselves as the researcher. They did the study of the bilingual and monolingual. They did the research in 3 studies. They study the effect of bilingualism and aging in cogtive process.

In conlusion, the bilinguals in the present studies had used their two languages essentially every day of their lives, at least since the age of about 10 years, The bilinguals were more efficient at all ages tested and showed a slower rate of decline for some processes with aging.