Poster A46, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 10:15 am – 12:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Validating the Survey of Experience in Code-Switching Environments (SECSE)
Angelique Blackburn1, Brenda Guerrero1;1Texas A&M International University
The way bilinguals use language in daily life has been shown to elicit long-term differences in neural responses, in particular in the event-related potential linked to interference suppression—the N2 effect during the Flanker and Simon tasks [Blackburn (2018), SAGE Research Methods Cases. 10.4135/9781526440976]. These neural differences can be explained by the Adaptive Control Hypothesis, that bilinguals communicate in three different contexts that each require different amounts of interference suppression: a single-language context in which one language is used and interference from the other language is suppressed, a dual-language context in which bilinguals must suppress high levels of interference as they strategically switch between languages with changes in conversations, and a dense code-switching context in which bilinguals do not need to suppress interference because they can use more than one language within a conversation [Green & Wei (2014). Lang Cogn Neurosci, 29(4), 499-511]. To fill a need for a measurement of a bilingual’s environment-based language habits, we created an assessment tool to measure how much time a bilingual spends in each context. The Survey of Experience in Code-Switching Environments (SECSE) is a 5-10 minute assessment of the relative time spent in each environment across the lifespan. The survey was found to be valid when comparing the calculated percentage of time spent in each context to self-report of participants who were trained to recognize the three bilingual language contexts (N = 47, p < .05). The percentage of respondents who agreed with the score increased from 76.6% to 91.5% when survey scores were converted from percentages into nominal categories, indicating that participants may more consistently report categories (e.g., rarely in a context) than percentages (e.g., 10% of the time in a context). We are currently testing reliability in a larger sample and confirming survey validity by assessing whether a bilingual’s primary language context on SECSE predicts interference suppression ability, measured as the amplitude of the N2 effect during the Flanker task. Evidence of a larger N2 effect in participants who have been categorized using SECSE as dual-language bilinguals, as predicted by the Adaptive Control Hypothesis, would further validate this survey. The survey is available for free download.
Themes: Control, Selection, and Executive Processes, Multilingualism
Method: Behavioral