Abstract
This study addresses a gap in the literature on executive function advantages among bilingual speakers by investigating a group of elderly, long-term, immersed bilinguals. Our participants are native Dutch speakers who emigrated to Australia as adults and have spent many years in that country. They are compared on a range of cognitive and linguistic measures to native Dutch and native English control groups. We argue that, due to the massive differences in the bilingual experience, group analyses may fall short of capturing the full picture. We argue instead for a more qualitative approach, which takes into account as detailed a picture of bilingual development, daily language habits and, in particular, code-switching habits as possible.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 64-85 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue number | 1-2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2016 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Preparation of this manuscript was made possible by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) Veni Innovation Scheme Grant 275-70-030 to Merel Keijzer, which is hereby gratefully acknowledged. We would furthermore like to thank the participants of the Multilingualism across the lifespan workshop (at UGhent) for their useful comments on an earlier presentation of this paper, most notably Wouter Duyck and the other experimental psychologists at UGhent for suggesting useful theoretical perspectives to include. Last but not least we would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editors of this special issue for the extremely useful comments they provided on an earlier version of this paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Keywords
- Bilingual advantage
- Executive function
- Language and aging
- Language attrition
- Late bilinguals