Linguistic and cognitive processing in bilinguals Study in kinematic action control

Abstract

Abstract newlineThere was a time when bilingualism or multilingualism was considered an aberration. But in the newlinemodern world it has become a norm rather than exception. Psycholinguists and cognitive newlinescientists all over the world in various labs are investigating the language and cognition from newlinemonolingualism, bilingualism and multilingualism perspectives. How does language experience newlineshape our neural and cognitive mechanism and what are its implications in the real world is an newlineactively researched issue in bilingual cognition. Several new discoveries like parallel language newlineactivation, bilingualism mediated reconfiguration of the brain, health and academic benefits of newlinebilingualism have been established in the 21st century. However, the debate has become even newlinestronger on the real benefits of bilingualism and many assumptions are being questioned. So we newlineare in an interesting era where more evidences in different contexts than the most researched newlinewestern contexts is drawing attention of the researchers. newlineIn this thesis, I explore how different language contexts in bilingualism shape language newlineprocessing and cognition and also test the previous findings using a novel paradigm of mouse newlinetracking that allows for fine grained temporal measurement of linguistic and cognitive newlineprocessing. Mainly language comprehension and production in bilinguals have been investigated newlinein this thesis. newlineThere are altogether five chapters in this thesis. First chapter gives a historical, theoretical, newlinemethodological background to this study. Second chapter is an investigation into the offline and newlineonline measure of language dominance and selectivity in bilinguals. This chapter shows newlineefficiency of online measure in investigating language attenuation and attrition with the shift in newlinexvi newlinelanguage dominance and the need to a careful balance of offline and online measures in the study newlineof language dominance in bilinguals. The third chapter investigates the factor modulating newlinelanguage attenuation, namely, immigration and immersion. Previous studies have shown tha