Effects of ageing and bilingualism in pragmatic inferences and executive functions

The twenty-first century is witnessing a shift in attitude towards the acquisition of more than one language. Bilingualism that was once considered to lower the intelligence of the 'afflicted' is now being suggested as contributing to better cognitive abilities, and delaying the onset of dementia. The other pressing issue that the 21st century is facing in many parts of the developed world is a rapidly ageing population. Thus, the present study examined the effects of age(ing) and bilingualism on two important aspects of human life: our ability to infer nonliteral meaning (i.e. pragmatic inferences) and executive functions (EF). The present study also explored the relationship between pragmatic inferences and executive functions, and has documented a small number of case studies on EF and pragmatic inferring in AD. Four groups of participants made up of young {17 -23 years) and old {60- 83), and monolinguals (English speakers in the UK) and bilinguals {English-Tamil speakers in Singapore) were put through a set of linguistic tasks (pragmatic inferring tasks that included nonconventional indirect requests, conventional metaphors and novel metaphors) and non-linguistic tasks (Simon, Stroop Arrow, Spatial N-Back, ColourShape etc.) that recorded the participants' pragmatic inferential abilities and executive functioning (namely, inhibition, updating and switching). The present study has found that there was a bilingual advantage in pragmatic inference-making for some nonliteral language types. There was an age effect on pragmatic inferencemaking, but, again, not for all nonliteral language types. There was no bilingualism effect on executive functions, but young bilinguals were found to have a smaller Mixing Cost than the young monolinguals and old bilinguals, presumably due to their greater code-switching frequency. An age effect w.a s found for inhibition (where old participants obtained better accuracy scores than the young) and updating, but none for Switching/Shifting, except for the Mixing Cost. It was also found that updating was predominantly a significant contributor to pragmatic inference-making. And lastly, there were relationships between updating and pragmatic inference-making, but only for some non literal language types and that too, for bilingual participants. While past studies have found effects of bilingualism in inhibition, the present study has shown that updating seems to be an important EF resource for bilinguals in discourse processing. In addition, as predicted in the study, frequent code-switching contributed positively to better global sustained control mechanisms

Creating a corpus of multilingual parent-child speech remotely: lessons learned in a large-scale onscreen picturebook sharing task

With lockdowns and social distancing measures in place, research teams looking to collect naturalistic parent-child speech interactions have to develop alternatives to in-lab recordings and observational studies with long-stretch recordings. We designed a novel micro-longitudinal study, the Talk Together Study, which allowed us to create a rich corpus of parent-child speech interactions in a fully online environment (N participants = 142, N recordings = 410). In this paper, we discuss the methods we used, and the lessons learned during adapting and running the study. These lessons learned cover nine domains of research design, monitoring and feedback: Recruitment strategies, Surveys and Questionnaires, Video-call scheduling, Speech elicitation tools, Videocall protocols, Participant remuneration strategies, Project monitoring, Participant retention, and Data Quality, and may be used as a primer for teams planning to conduct remote studies in the future.Nanyang Technological UniversityNational Research Foundation (NRF)Published versionThis project was supported by Singapore’s National Research Foundation under the Science of Learning grant, ‘How do language mixes contribute to effective bilingualism and effective biliteracy in Singapore’ (NRF2016-SOL002-011) and Nanyang Technological University under CRADLE@NTU grant (JHU IO 90071537) and NAP Start Up Grant (M4081215.100) awarded to SJS

Proceedings of the OHBM Brainhack 2021

The global pandemic presented new challenges and op-portunities for organizing conferences, and OHBM 2021was no exception. The OHBM Brainhack is an event thatoccurs just prior to the OHBM meeting, typically in-per-son, where scientists of all levels of expertise and interestgather to work and learn together for a few days in a col-laborative hacking-style environment on projects of com-mon interest (1). Building off the success of the OHBM2020 Hackathon (2), the 2021 Open Science SpecialInterest Group came together online to organize a largecoordinated Brainhack event that would take place overthe course of 4 days. The OHBM 2021 Brainhack eventwas organized along two guiding principles, providinga highly inclusive collaborative environment for inter-action between scientists across disciplines and levelsof expertise to push forward important projects thatneed support, also known as the “Hack-Track” of theBrainhack. The second aim of the OHBM Brainhack is toempower scientists to improve the quality of their sci-entific endeavors by providing high-quality hands-ontraining on best practices in open-science approaches.This is best exemplified by the training events providedby the “Train-Track” at the OHBM 2021 Brainhack. Here,we briefly explain both of these elements of the OHBM2021 Brainhack, before continuing on to the Brainhackproceedings