Hi. Welcome back to our Office Hours.
I'm here with the Dr.
Arturo Hernandez to answer some of the questions that we found in forms.
So let's just dive right in and get started.
The first question has to do with a little bit of confusion from video 6.5.
In that video you talk about how children have more difficulty switching,
like they slow down when they have to switch.
And then adults have a, they don't have as much of the difficulty in switching,
so the switching costs decrease for adults.
But then, you then say that the ability to
switch between tasks becomes more difficult for adults even though it
seems like it was kind of the opposite from what you said before.
Would you be able to clarify that a little?
>> Sure.
I, I guess the confusion is I should have said older adults [CROSSTALK] and somehow
that word didn't come out so, essentially what happens is the switching effect or
the cost of having to switch between tasks is largest in younger children and
then it, that slowdown gets smaller.
So in other words, it starts to approach just doing one single task.
It's never the same, it's always slower to do,
to switch between tasks than do a single task, but that difference gets smaller.
And then it stays pretty stable up until about 40 to 50, and
then it grows again after 60, roughly.
>> Mm-hm.
>> So, you see basically something like this that gets smaller and
then, it gets larger again.
So.
>> Okay. So, that's what you've meant by-
>> Right.
>> Older adults.
>> Yeah. >> Actually have more difficult times.
>> That's correct.
>> Okay. >> The older adults have a more difficult
time switching, which is interesting in light of the fact that older adults in
our literature seems to be showing that older adult bilinguals seem to show
an advantage relative to young adult sorry relative to monolinguals.
And that advance seems to be bigger.
The interesting thing about the data that we collected was that
the older adults showed more of a slowdown relative to the young adult bilinguals.
So even though switching is much harder for
them, and that's also true in the, in the monolingual literature.
Maybe one suggestion is that because it's so
hard to switch for older adults in general if a bilingual has to do that,
where they're speaking to one set of people and then they switch to speaking to
another set of people that that's a sort of form of mental exercise.
That's the, that's the suggestion from the literature.
Because our, our effects were pretty gargantuan.
And it's, you could see it and it's maybe a second, second and
a half longer between the young adult and the older adult bilingual.
Or I think it's something like 400 milliseconds when you look
at just a single condition or a single language.
So it's a really big effect and, and it's there also in children,
although children of course are developing, so there is the added thing of
having learning language, on top of the switching.
But again yes, it should have been older adults.
>> Okay, so we hope that that clarifies things-
>> [LAUGH].
>> For you guys, it was a little confusing so hopefully that takes care of that.
So the next question comes from a poster who was kind of disappointed that we
didn't talk more about ASL and
acquisition of a sign language as opposed to a spoken language.
And they were wondering if there are differences in brain
imaging of deaf children who were exposed to ASL early in life and
those who were exposed later in life.