Name: examining bilingual language control using the stroop task
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Description: Watch this Scientific Journal Video about Examining Bilingual Language Control Using the Stroop Task at JoVE.com

The research presented here was supported by a SSHRC Standard Research Grant and a SSHRC Insight Grant to the 1st author and by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and an Ontario Graduate Fellowship to the 2nd author. We wish to thank the members of the ERPLing lab for discussion of the data and for help with the testing of the participants.

All methods and procedures described here have been approved by the University of Ottawa Research Ethics Board.
<img alt="Figure 1" class="xfigimg" src="/files/ftp_upload/60479/60479fig1a.jpg" /> 
Figure 1: Stroop task sample stimuli. The color and noncolor terms as well as the background color used in the current experiment are shown. For Incongruent and Neutral stimuli, sample color-word stimuli are shown. In the experiment, any word cou...

<ol>
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K. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Does+language+proficiency+modulate+oculomotor+control?+Evidence+from+Hindi-English+bilinguals.">Does language proficiency modulate oculomotor control? Evidence from Hindi-English bilinguals.</a> Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 15, 771-781 (2012).</li><li>Blumenfeld, H. K., Marian, V. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Cognitive+control+in+bilinguals:+advantages+in+stimulus-stimulus+inhibition.">Cognitive control in bilinguals: advantages in stimulus-stimulus inhibition.</a> Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 17 (3), 610-629 (2014).</li><li>Brauer, M., Healy, A. F., Bourne, L. 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J., Stanley, E. M., Wicha, N. Y. Y. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Cognitive+and+electrophysiological+correlates+of+the+bilingual+Stroop+effect.">Cognitive and electrophysiological correlates of the bilingual Stroop effect.</a> Frontiers in Psychology. 3 (81), 1-16 (2012).</li><li>Zied, K. M., et al. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Bilingualism+and+adult+differences+in+inhibitory+mechanisms:+Evidence+from+a+bilingual+Stroop+task.">Bilingualism and adult differences in inhibitory mechanisms: Evidence from a bilingual Stroop task.</a> Brain and Cognition. 54, 254-256 (2004).</li><li>Tzelgov, J., Henik, A., Leiser, D. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Controlling+Stroop+interference:+Evidence+from+a+bilingual+task.">Controlling Stroop interference: Evidence from a bilingual task.</a> Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 16, 760-771 (1990).</li><li>Pelham, S. 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The experimental design presented here describes a twist on the traditional Stroop task. The main goal of this twist is to add a level of complexity to the task that may allow differences to emerge between groups that, due to their age, are being tested at their peak of performance. Essentially, to make the task more challenging in order to be able to distinguish between groups, we added a mixed-language block to the traditional Stroop task, which typically only collects data from trials in one language at a time. For th...

The Stroop task, named after its creator John Ridley Stroop, has enjoyed over 80 years of popularity in the literature1. This simple task has been used in hundreds of studies, with different variants created to examine diverse populations and research questions in fields such as psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. In particular, it has allowed researchers to examine language processes such as the automaticity of written word reading2, as well as associated cognitive control processes. The latter are also termed &#34;executive control&#34;, and encompass a set of processes that include, but are not limited to, inhibition (i.e., interference suppression), attention, conflict monitoring and resolution, selection, and task switching. Looking specifically at bilinguals, the task is highly suitable for obtaining measures of language interference and control in both a bilingual&#39;s first language (L1) and second language (L2), as well as for testing the bilingual advantage hypothesis3, which is currently a topic of considerable debate.4
In the original task, the colors red, green, blue, brown, and purple were used in a series of three experiments. In the first experiment, participants read aloud a list of color words printed in incongruent colors (e.g., the word PURPLE printed in blue ink; correct answer &#34;purple&#34;) and the same list printed in black ink. In the second experiment, participants said aloud the color of the words in the list (e.g., the word PURPLE printed in blue ink; correct answer &#34;blue&#34;) and also named the same colors presented simply as colored squares. Finally, the third experiment examined whether practice of these tasks would affect the outcome, measured in all cases as the time required to read or to name the items in a given list.
The results revealed an interesting asymmetry between word-reading and color-naming: the difference between reading words in different colors and in black was a nonsignificant 2.3 seconds (or a 5.6% increase in the time required to read the color words), while the difference between naming the colors in which incongruent color words were written and naming the colors of squares was a 47.0 seconds, or a significant 74.3% increase in naming time for the words1. In other words, colors did not interfere with word reading, but reading strongly interfered with color naming. This increase in color naming time in the presence of a conflicting written word has come to be known as the Stroop effect, and while practice can reduce its magnitude, the interference cannot be altogether eliminated.
Different theories have been proposed to account for the Stroop effect, and in an extensive review of 50 years of Stroop literature, MacLeod5 describes two of the more predominant ones: 1) the relative speed of processing and 2) selective attention. In the former, words are read faster than colors are named, and this difference in relative processing time causes the Stroop effect. In the latter, the controlled, resource-intensive process of color naming occurs in parallel with the automatic process of reading; the direct competition between diverging word and color information is the source of interference and the Stroop effect2. The theory of selective attention is currently the more accepted view6,7,8,9.
Resolving the word-color competition is a cognitively demanding process that requires inhibiting distracting information while turning attention to the goal of the task. In order to correctly name the color, this interference from the automatically processed written word must be suppressed, while attention must be turned to the less practiced, and therefore controlled, task of color naming. Thus, the Stroop task becomes a measure of not only inhibition, but also of attention, and through various manipulations, it allows different levels of cognitive control to be examined10. Typically, a decreased magnitude of Stroop interference is considered indicative of better inhibition and attentional resource allocation. A full theoretical review of the Stroop task is beyond the scope of the current paper, but is available from previous works2,5. Although nonlinguistic versions of the Stroop task exist (e.g., numerical11, oculomotor12, spatial13), the current work is interested in linguistic cognitive control, and the remainder of the discussion will therefore be focused on the original linguistic version of the task.
The original Stroop task has undergone various modifications since 1935, and the task commonly used now includes a congruent condition where the color word is presented in the color it names (the word BLUE presented in blue ink; correct answer, &#34;blue&#34;) and a control condition that can be made up of colored shapes as in the original task, asterisks (***), a row of symbols such as X&#39;s, %&#39;s or #&#39;s, or high-frequency, noncolor-related words (e.g., DOG). These additions allow the Stroop task to examine facilitation effects. Facilitation effects are brought about by the convergence of information from the written word and the visual color in the congruent condition and thereby speed up naming times7 (although see MacLeod5 for reliability issues regarding facilitation effects). They can also be used to obtain baseline reading time or color naming time measures using the control items, in addition to Stroop interference effects. Facilitation and interference are defined as the difference in response time between the congruent and control, and as the difference between the incongruent and control trials, respectively, although the Stroop effect can sometimes be calculated as the difference between the congruent and incongruent trial, as in the original task6. In the task, the congruent, incongruent, and neutral conditions can be presented in individual blocks (all congruent, all incongruent, or all neutral trials) or in a single block made up of all three conditions, and in a variety of languages.
In the bilingual Stroop task, color terms in the bilingual&#39;s first language (L1) or second language (L2), or both, may be presented, and participants may be instructed to name the colors in either of their two languages. This type of task allows researchers to examine both within-language interference (by having the participant name L1 words in the L1 and L2 words in the L2) and between-language interference (naming L1 words in the L2, and vice versa), giving greater insight into how bilinguals process and manage their languages. For example, between-language interference can tell us about lexical representation and the strength of connections between languages in the mental lexicon, and this interference is typically smaller than within-language interference14.
A variety of language pairs have been used for the Stroop task&#39;s bilingual adaptation, including Chinese-English15,16, Japanese-English15,17,18, Spanish-English15,19,20, French-Arabic21, Arabic-Hebrew22, English-Greek14, English-German14, and Dutch-English7. As some have noted15, factors such as orthography in these languages can influence the magnitude of the within- and between-language interference. Still, despite differences in magnitude, the Stroop effect is always apparent.
It is important to note that many of the studies that incorporate two languages simultaneously20 require overt naming, which is susceptible to lexical access effects23. In tasks requiring a button press, the L1 and L2 are typically presented separately24, and only include three or four colors6,8. However, such a presentation may make the task too simple for young adults, whose cognitive control abilities are at their peak25, and result in all participants performing at ceiling. Thus, a single-language presentation with a small number of possible responses may not be sufficient to elicit any possible differences between groups of young adult bilinguals. Therefore, the current protocol seeks to increase the task challenge by increasing the number of color terms and mixing both the L1 and L2 items in a single block, thus not only examining reading automaticity, attention, and cognitive control processes, but also creating a task that is suitable for testing bilingual cognitive control in the young adult population.
In this bilingual task, stimuli were selected in English and French. An example of our stimuli in used is in Figure 1. However, any two languages can be used. For this reason, the protocol below will simply use Language A (La) and Language B (Lb) to describe stimuli in each language. For full details of the experimental protocol, please refer to our previous work26,27.

<table border="1" fo:keep-together.within-page="1" fo:keep-with-next.within-page="always">
	<tbody>
		<tr>
			<td>Button box</td>
			<td>Cedrus</td>
			<td></td>
			<td>Button box for response; however, any response pad or the computer keyboard can be used to collect responses.</td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>Desktop computer (Windows OS)</td>
			<td>Dell</td>
			<td></td>
			<td>Computer system for delivering stimuli; however, any computer, including laptops, can be used.</td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>Presentation</td>
			<td>Neurobehavioural Systems</td>
			<td></td>
			<td>Software for presenting behavioural experiments; however, the experiment can be programmed using a variety of experimental software.</td>
		</tr>
	</tbody>
</table>

examining bilingual language control using the stroop task

The Stroop task in its many variations has been used in fields such as psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience to examine questions regarding the automaticity of reading, language processing, and cognitive control, among others. When looking at bilingual individuals, this task can be used to obtain measures of language interference and control in both a bilingual&#39;s first language (L1) and second language (L2), as well as for testing the bilingual advantage hypothesis. The Stroop task presents participants with color terms written in congruent colors (e.g., the word RED written in red font), incongruent colors (e.g., the word RED written in green font), in addition to noncolor terms for control (e.g., the word TREE presented in any color), and uses the reaction times from the different conditions to assess the degree of interference and facilitation. In the covert version of the Stroop bilingual task (i.e., participants respond by pressing a button rather than naming aloud), stimuli in the L1 and the L2 are typically presented in separate blocks. While this allows for a simple, yet effective assessment of processing and cognitive control in each language, it fails to capture any potential differences in processing and control within bilingual young adult groups. The present task combines single-language blocks with a novel mixed-language block to increase the level of difficulty of the task, thus making it suitable for testing cognitive control in young adults. Representative results showing differences between performance in the single-language vs. mixed-language blocks are presented, and the benefits of a mixed-language block are discussed.

One benefit of including both single-language blocks as well as a mixed-language blocks is that it is possible to confirm the expected results (facilitation and inhibition effects) in each of the participants&#39; languages. It will then be possible to interpret the findings from the mixed-language block. The results presented below are from a study investigating English-French Bilinguals. One of our main research questions focuses on how the age at which a second language is learned (age of acquisition, or AoA) may affe...

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Examining Bilingual Language Control Using the Stroop Task

This bilingual Stroop task uses Congruent, Incongruent, and Neutral stimuli presented in blocks in the first language (L1) only, the second language (L2) only, and a combination of L1 and L2. This task allows for an examination of language processing and cognitive control in both L1 and L2.

The Stroop task in its many variations has been used in fields such as psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience to examine questions regarding the ...

Our modification of the Stroop Task allow us to examine cognitive control abilities, specifically in young adults as it can elicit differences between groups of bilinguals that are otherwise obscured. Setting up the Stroop Task is quick and simple. Our protocol increases the level of task difficulty, making it suitable for participants who's cognitive abilities are already at their peak.Demonstrating the procedure will be Leah Gosselin and Gabrielle Manning who are Ph.D.students in my lab. To create the congruent items in language A, program six color terms written in capital letters in size 60 Times New Roman font for which the written word and the font color match. To create the incongruent items in language A, program six color terms written in capital letters in size 60 Times New Roman font for which the written word and the font color do not match.To create the neutral items in language A, program six non-color and non-color associated terms written in capital letters in size 60 Times New Roman font. Present each word in each of the colors used in the previous two steps and repeat the previous three steps to create items in language B.Making sure not to use color terms that are cognates in the two languages. For two single language block creation, first create a language A block that includes 25 congruent, 25 incongruent, and 25 neutral items for a total of 75 items in the block, including five neutral practice items at the beginning of the block.Program the experiment to present all of the items in randomized intermixed trials as illustrated and create a language B block with 25 congruent, 25 incongruent, and 25 neutral items for a total of 75 items in the block, including five neutral practice items at the beginning of the block. Then program the experiment to present all of the items in randomized intermixed trials, including a self-timed break between the two blocks and a self-timed break before the presentation of the mixed language block. To create one mixed language block, create a block which includes the 25 congruent, 25 incongruent, and 25 neutral items in language A and the 25 congruent, 25 incongruent, and 25 neutral items in language B for a total of 150 items in the block, including five neutral practice items at the beginning of the block.Then program the experiment to present all of the items in randomized intermixed trials as demonstrated. To perform a Stroop Task analysis, test the participants in a sound attenuated testing room, seated comfortably in front of a computer screen with a button box in front of them. Explain to the participants that they will see words in different colors on the screen in front of them and that their task is to press the button that matches the color of the text that they see.Emphasize that the participants should answer as quickly and accurately as possible, but that it is okay if they make a mistake. Allow time for the participants to ask questions. Participants sometimes try to use strategies to get all of the correct answers, but it is critical that they answer without taking time to think about their response.Once the participants are comfortable with the task, leave the testing area and allow the participants to begin the experiment. At the end of the experiment, thank the participants for their time and debrief them about the task and its purpose. As observed in the figure in this analysis, each of the participant groups demonstrated both facilitation and inhibition effects.However, using only the single language blocks, there was no reason to claim any differences between the simultaneous and early bilingual groups. However, when looking at the same effects in the mixed language block, each language group exhibited differing effects of facilitation and inhibition. It's important to present both languages individually and mixed together in order to assess cognitive control.This is particularly important when testing young adult bilinguals. The Stroop Task can be combined with a non-language based task to assess whether any results obtained indicate enhanced language control or if the benefits are domain general. This twist to the Stroop Paradigm has not yet been used to explore new questions.This paradigm will allow us to better investigate how individual differences effect cognitive control.

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Behavior

The 5-Choice Serial Reaction Time Task: A Task of Attention and Impulse Control for Rodents

This protocol describes the 5-choice serial reaction time task, which is an operant based task used to study attention and impulse control in rodents. ...

Using the Threat Probability Task to Assess Anxiety and Fear During Uncertain and Certain Threat

Fear of certain threat and anxiety about uncertain threat are distinct emotions with unique behavioral, cognitive-attentional, and neuroanatomical ...

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm

The ability to recall the past allows us to report on details of previous experiences, from the everyday to the significant. Because recall memory is ...

The Emotional Stroop Task: Assessing Cognitive Performance under Exposure to Emotional Content

The emotional Stroop effect (ESE) is the result of longer naming latencies to ink colors of emotion words than to ink colors of neutral words. The ...

Behavioral Assessment of Hearing in 2 to 4 Year-old Children: A Two-interval, Observer-based Procedure Using Conditioned Play-based Responses

Collecting reliable behavioral data from toddlers and preschoolers is challenging. As a result, there are significant gaps in our understanding of human ...

The (Spatial) Memory Game: Testing the Relationship Between Spatial Language, Object Knowledge, and Spatial Cognition

The Spatial Memory Game: Testing the Relationship Between Spatial Language, Object Knowledge, and Spatial Cognition

The memory game paradigm is a behavioral procedure to explore the relationship between language, spatial memory, and object knowledge. Using two different ...

Using Eye Movements Recorded in the Visual World Paradigm to Explore the Online Processing of Spoken Language

In a typical eye tracking study using the visual world paradigm, participants' eye movements to objects or pictures in the visual workspace are recorded ...

Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism

Sentence comprehension relies on the ability to rapidly integrate different types of linguistic and non-linguistic information. However, there is ...

Decomposing the Variance in Reading Comprehension to Reveal the Unique and Common Effects of Language and Decoding

The Simple View of Reading is a popular model of reading that claims that reading is the product of decoding and language, with each component uniquely ...

Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm

We discuss the use of the preferential looking paradigm in eye tracking studies in order to study how infants develop, understand, and attend to the world ...