Bilingualism and Attention: A Study of Balanced and Unbalanced Bilingual Deaf Users of American Sign Language and English

Early deafness is thought to affect low-level sensorimotor processing such as selective attention, whereas bilingualism is thought to be strongly associated with higher order cognitive processing such as attention switching under cognitive load.This study explores the effects of bimodal-bilingualism...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of deaf studies and deaf education 2010-07, Vol.15 (3), p.263-273
Main Authors: Kushalnagar, Poorna, Hannay, H. Julia, Hernandez, Arturo E.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adults
Age
Age Differences
American Sign Language
Attention
Bilingual education
Bilingualism
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive Processes
Deaf education
Deafness
Deafness - epidemiology
Ear, auditive nerve, cochleovestibular tract, facial nerve: diseases, semeiology
Empirical
Empirical Articles
English
English language
Female
Follow-Up Studies
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Genetic Counseling
Handicap
Humans
Impact analysis
Language
Language Acquisition
Language Proficiency
Linguistics
Male
Medical sciences
Multilingualism
Non tumoral diseases
Otorhinolaryngology. Stomatology
Persons With Hearing Impairments
Prospective Studies
Psychology and medicine
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Second language acquisition
Selective attention
Sign Language
Surveys and Questionnaires
United States
Visual fields
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Early deafness is thought to affect low-level sensorimotor processing such as selective attention, whereas bilingualism is thought to be strongly associated with higher order cognitive processing such as attention switching under cognitive load.This study explores the effects of bimodal-bilingualism (in American Sign Language and written English) on attention switching, in order to contrast the roles of bilingual proficiency and age of acquisition in relation to cognitive flexibility among deaf adults. Results indicated a strong high-proficiency bilingual advantage in the higher order attention task. The level of proficiency in 2 languages appears to be the driving force for cognitive flexibility However, additional data are needed to reach conclusive interpretation for the influence of age of second language acquisition on higher order attention-switching ability and associated cognitive flexibility.
ISSN:1081-4159
1465-7325
DOI:10.1093/deafed/enq011