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Development of skilled performance: An age-related perspective
Published in Diane L. Damos, Multiple-task performance, 2020
Arthur D. Fisk, Wendy A. Rogers
A lexical decision task consists of presenting two letter strings and requiring the subject to determine if they are both words (Meyer and Schvanaveldt, 1971). A variation of this task involves the presentation of a semantic prime followed by a letter string. (A prime activates information that is stored in long-term memory. Semantic priming refers to the presentation of some word which activates the semantic concepts associated with that word). The validity of the prime can be manipulated to enable cost-benefit analysis (Posner and Snyder, 1975). The semantic priming effects observed in lexical decision tasks (i.e., having just made a judgement about one word facilitates judgements about semantically related words) are often interpreted in terms of the automatic spreading activation which accompanies looking up a word in memory.
The cognitive and neural correlates of written language: a selective review of bilingualism
Published in Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 2021
Karen E. Waldie, Gjurgjica Badzakova-Trajkov, Haeme R. P. Park, Yuxuan Zheng, Denise Neumann, Nasrin Zamani Foroushani
Unexpectedly, we found relative hypoactivation of left temporal lobe areas (including Wernicke’s area) in our bilinguals during the L2 lexical decision task. This area, typically associated with language processing, was active for the L1 lexical decision task in both the monolingual and bilingual groups, suggesting that the minimum activity observed was particular to L2 only. In another study with moderately proficient bilinguals, the authors observed that the left temporal areas failed to engage during word comprehension tasks when using their second language (Dehaene et al. 1997). It is possible that this activation failure of a key linguistic region is compensated by other areas of the brain, as indicated by the bilinguals’ accurate performance (89%). Interestingly, the level of expertise in a task is an important moderator in studies testing the neural efficiency hypothesis (Dunst et al. 2014), which posits an inverse relation between brain activation and intelligence (Haier et al. 1992). This further suggests that the additional activity seen in the bilingual brain is not due to separate language areas specifically dedicated to processing L2, but rather due to greater cortical recruitment as result of computational difficulty.