Event Details

This event is co-organized by the Multilingualism and Cognition Research Group and the Heritage Language 2 Consortium (HL2C).

We are delighted to announce a special event jointly hosted with our colleagues from Psychology.

The session will feature two invited talks, delivered back-to-back, by guest speakers whose work bridges bilingualism, cognitive neuroscience and psychology.

Invited speaker 1: Toms Voits (Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg)

Title: Growing old with more than one language: How can bilingualism research inform cognitive neuroscience of aging

As global populations age, increasing attention is being paid to lifestyle and experiential factors that may delay the onset of cognitive aging and promote the longevity of healthy life and cognition. Bilingualism has emerged as one such factor – a promising contributor to more successful cognitive aging trajectories and outcomes. In the first part of this talk I will present empirical research across different populations honing in on bilingual effects on the hippocampus – a brain structure essential for learning and memory that, crucially, is particularly sensitive to the aging process and implicated in dementia. In the second part of my talk, I will consider bilingualism within a broader context of lifestyle factors and present data showing the unique role of bilingualism among them. I will explore the nuanced effects of bilingual experiences on the aging brain and outline an interdisciplinary approach to cognitive aging research integrating language experiences with other demographic, lifestyle, and biological factors to better understand their combined effects on the brain.

Invited speaker 2: Andriy Myachykov (Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of Macau)

Title: Crosslinguistic Interplay and Cognitive Control in Bilinguals

The mechanisms underlying second language learning and use remain at the center of research in psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. On the one hand, research continues to elucidate the interplay between the co-existing linguistic codes in a bilingual mind. On the other hand, it has been shown that speaking more than one language leads to potential advantages related to cognitive control, memory, and healthy ageing, the exact neurocognitive mechanisms of this interplay remain unclear.

My talk will, therefore, have two parts. First, I will present behavioral and neurophysiological data demonstrating a rapid cross-linguistic interplay in bilinguals and, therefore, the notion of a shared storage for L1 and L2 lexicons. Second, I will discuss several studies documenting the effect of L2 proficiency on cognitive control in bilinguals. Most importantly, I will argue that bilingualism, operationalized as a continuous factor, can be viewed as an important contributor among other proxies of neurocognitive reserve – an individual’s ability to compensate for age-related neural deterioration and optimize cognitive performance

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