Bilingualism and Cognitive Processing

Tamar H. Gollan, Ph.D.
Associate Adjunct Professor
Hispanic Program Coordinator, UCSD Alzheimer's Disease Research Center
Department of Psychiatry
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093-0948
phone: (858) 677-1562
fax: (858) 622-1017
email: tgollan@ucsd.edu

Hello!

This web page will tell you about my research on Bilingualism and Aging which is currently funded by an R01 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). I began this research with a Career Development Award K23 from National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). Young participants for our aging study are tested primarily on the UCSD campus in the Language Production Lab, our healthy aging bilinguals, and more recently our bilinguals with Alzheimer's disease, come from a longitudinal study based at the UCSD Alzheimer's Disease Center.

To get a quick idea of my research goals you can read the abstracts of my R01 here or of my Career Development Award (K23), and you can browse through my publications, submitted manuscripts, chapters, and presentations. For more detail you can read some selected abstracts. If you want to talk to me the best way to contact me is via email at tgollan@ucsd.edu.

The rest of this web page will tell you who I am, about my teaching experience, and about who I work with including students I have mentored.

Research Interests

RESEARCH FRAMEWORK:

Bilinguals need to learn and efficiently retrieve about twice as many words as monolinguals. Such learning takes time, and it would be very surprising if this doubled load didn't produce any difference between bilinguals and monolinguals. Our research on young bilinguals suggests that significant differences do exist between groups, although they are subtle, and very specific. When compared with monolinguals, bilinguals name pictures more slowly (by about 80 milliseconds; Gollan, Montoya, Fennema- Notestine, & Morris, 2005), have reduced category fluency (i.e., produce fewer words that belong to semantic categories such as Animals and phonemic categories such as words-beginning-with-the-letter-F; Gollan, Montoya, & Werner, 2002), and bilinguals are more likely to have a tip-of-the-tongue or TOT state (Gollan & Silverberg, 2001). TOTs are that frustrating experience you have when you can't remember a word that you are sure you know. For more on TOTs read Debby Burke's stuff or Nina Silverberg's TOT summary. On the flip side of these bilingual disadvantages are a host of obvious advantages that bilingualism entails such as being able to communicate with a broader audience, and diversity of cultural experiences. We have also found ways to make differences between bilinguals and monolinguals go away. For example, bilinguals have the same number of TOTs as monolinguals when trying to retrieve words that are similar across languages (e.g., trompeta which is the Spanish word for trumpet; Gollan & Acenas, 2004), or when retrieving proper names which are also similar across languages (e.g., Tamar is Tamar in both Hebrew and in English; Gollan, Bonanni, & Montoya, 2005). Bilinguals name pictures as quickly as monolinguals if they are given just one extra practice trial with naming a picture (i.e., comparing monolinguals on 2nd naming to bilinguals on 3rd), and bilinguals perform similary to monolinguals on some tasks that don't require a language specific response (e.g., classifying pictures as "human made" or "natural" kinds; Gollan et al., 2005). The appearance of a bilingual disadvantage in some but not in other tasks helps us to understand what sorts of processing is required to complete these tasks, and constrains models of bilingualism, language processing, and cognitive control.

    THEORY: My favorite explanation for the disadvantages associated with bilingualism is simply that bilinguals spend less time using words particular to each language relative to monolinguals because bilinguals use each language only some of the time whereas monolinguals use the same language all the time. In other words, the performance differences may be attributed to differences in patterns of language use - and reduced-use or a "frequency lag" (Gollan, Montoya, Cera, & Sandoval, 2008). The frequency-lag account is an alternative to the more typical assumption which is that bilinguals suffer from interference between languages. Although, I agree that both languages are always active, my research questions the idea that all of the consequences of bilingualism should be attributed to competition or interference between language systems. The "interference account" falls out of another obvious thing about bilinguals which is that by knowing translation equivalents there is strong potential for competition for selection. Translation equiavlents are pairs of words that mean virtually (if not exactly) the same thing. In monolinguals such word pairs occur only to the extent that within-language synonyms exist (e.g., sofa and couch); for bilinguals, all cross-language translation equivalents may be considered very close synonyms. If so, and if words compete for selection, then bilinguals are constantly faced with a difficult selection problem. The interference account provides a nice explanation for a a number of cognitive processing advantages that bilingualism brings (e.g., delays age-related decline in cognitive control, delays the onset of Alzheimer's disease). To find out more about this check out Ellen Bialystok's research. An important point about the mechanism underlying bilingual advantages and disadvantages is that the notions of frequency-lag and interference are not mutually exclusive accounts - both could be right. Therefore, we aim to figure out which mechanism provides the best explanation for each effect we find.

    The frequency lag account provides an alternative explanation for experimental findings that challenge the interference assumption. For example bilinguals have the most TOTs for words that they only know in just one of their languages (see Gollan & Acenas, 2004) - such TOTs obviously cannot be attributed to competition between languages. Another challenge for the interference story is that bilinguals are disadvantaged relative to monolinguals even when bilinguals are tested only in their chosen stronger or dominant language. This is difficult for the interference account to explain because the nondominant language is relatively weak compared to the dominant one and may be too weak to compete, or may compete only if first boosted with a task that "turns it on". Some other evidence that suggests the frequency-lag account is correct is that bilinguals show bigger frequency effects than monolinguals in picture naming (Gollan et al., 2008). Finally, in other studies we have shown that translations sometimes can cue each other (i.e., the opposite of competition) in both language comprehension and even in production. For example, we found that bilinguals name pictures more easily if they know the name in both languages. Sometimes we find evidence for both cueing and competition between translations. A study we are currently writing about shows that bilinguals will have more TOTs if they are first primed with a translation equivalent in their nondominant language (e.g., bilinguals are more likely to get stuck in a TOT for the word strawberry if they first see the Spanish equivalent fresa), but we also find that primed TOTs are more likely to resolve spontaneously than unprimed TOTs, and that primed targets are retrieved more quickly when retrieval does not fail.

    AGING and ALZHEIMER'S: In recent work we have suggested that the interference account fails the aging test, and also the Alzheimer's test. In older age the ability to control interference and other executive functions decline. If bilingual language production required intact control then older bilinguals should not be very good bilinguals, and should have particular difficulty speaking a nondominant language relative to young bilinguals. This fits with the commonly held assumption that old and demented bilinguals revert to using primarily one language. The reduced-use account makes the opposite prediction which is that older people should be better bilinguals because they have had more time in which to learn twice as many words. Our research confirms this prediction in showing that older bilinguals are "better bilinguals" than young bilinguals in some respects. For example, older bilinguals retrieve low-frequency words in the nondominant language relatively more easily than young bilinguals (Gollan, et al., 2008). Others have shown that older bilinguals have more difficulty than young bilinguals with cued- and forced language-switching (Hernandez & Kohnert, 1999), but we recently reported these age effects largely reflect the burden of responding to experimentally provided language cues (Gollan & Ferreira, 2009). When aging bilinguals are allowed to voluntarily choose which language to use to name pictures, the age related switching difficulties largely vanish and old bilinguals choose to switch as often as young bilinguals. We have even found that bilinguals with Alzheimer's disease maintain surprisingly good ability to access names in a non-dominant language (Gollan, Salmon, Montoya, & da Pena, submitted), and all bilinguals (young, old, and with Alzheimer's) make very few cross-language intrusions (approximately 1-3% of the time; Sandoval & Gollan, in prep).

The best part about studying bilinguals is that by trying to figure out how bilinguals are different from monolinguals, we get to find out about all kinds of things such as why tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs) happen, how we choose among competing responses, how word frequency is represented in the lexicon, what causes people to switch between tasks, how aging and Alzheimer's disease affect access to the language system, and what is the role of executive control in language processing. Our studies reveal a small role for control in maintaining bilingualism, and a strong role for frequency of use. In more simple terms, this means that bilinguals are not constantly faced with a difficult selection problem - interference effects are limited.

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CLINICAL APPLICATIONS:

Many cognitive assessment tools tests rely on language and were not designed for use with bilinguals. This puts bilinguals at risk for being diagnosed with an impairment where none is present. To make matters even more complex, cognitively intact bilinguals sometimes produce an "Alzheimer's-like pattern" on some tests. For example, the bilingual fluency disadvantage is greater on semantic than on letter category fluency (see Gollan, Montoya, & Werner, 2002), bilinguals name fewer pictures correctly on the Boston Naming Test (see Gollan, Fennema-Notestine, Montoya, & Jernigan, 2007), and bilinguals produce less typical associations in the free association task than monolinguals (e.g., given bride bilinguals say pretty instead of groom which is the most common response in monolinguals). Interestingly, some language based measures do not reveal a bilingual disadvantage, and some tests that do not seem to require language do reveal a bilingual disadvantage. For example, preliminary results suggest that bilinguals perform as well as monolinguals on the CVLT-III (California Verbal Learning Test-III) which is a very difficult test in which people try to remember a list of 16 words. However, bilinguals were slower to classify pictures as either "fruit" or "vegetable." We are trying to determine if the bilingual disadvantage in fruit/vegetable classification resulted from a covert naming strategy that both bilinguals and monolinguals may employ to do this relatively difficult classification task (difficult because fruits and vegetables look alike). We are also studying whether differences between bilinguals and monolinguals will interfere with the early detection of AD in bilinguals, and we are trying to develop better tests to use for this purpose with bilinguals.

Currently, we are trying to determine the best way to test bilinguals for the purpose of identifying cognitive impairment in its earliest stages. In bilingual Alzheimer's disease (AD) we are finding that the dominant language is most sensitive to differences between patients and controls. This is consistent with the idea that early AD primarily affects the integrity of semantic representations, and that the dominant language has richer semantic representations than the nondominant language. For more on this see Matthew Finkbeiner's webpage, and work by David Salmon.

Biosketch BACK TO TOP

WHO I AM: I am a cognitive neuropsychologist, and a Hebrew-English-Spanish trilingual. Many of the research projects I direct involve comparing bilinguals to monolinguals with two goals: 1) to identify which tasks bilinguals perform differently, and 2) to develop explanations of the differences and similarities between groups. More broadly speaking, my research is aimed at identifying the cognitive mechanisms underlying young and aging bilingualism, and how clinical assessments of cognitive functioning need to be modified to accommodate bilinguals.

WHERE I WENT TO SCHOOL: I was an undergraduate at Brandeis University where I studied with Art Wingfield who later connected me to a research assistantship at Massachusetts General Hospital with Scott Sokol who is currently working as a clinical neuropsychologist and cantor (read more about that combination of professions here). I got my Ph.D. in clinical and cognitive psychology from the Univeristy of Arizona or UofA where I worked with Merrill Garrett and Ken Forster. I also worked with visiting professor Ram Frost who helped me run experiments in his lab at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Most recently, I was fortunate to have worked with Debby Burke as a post-doc at Pomona college, and to have Judy F. Kroll as a mentor on my career development award.

Collaborations BACK TO TOP

Name	Research Area	E-mail
Ines Antón-Mendez	grammatical encoding, bilingualism	Ines.Anton-Mendez@let.uu.nl
Alan Brown	tip of the tongue states (TOTs), memory	abrown@mail.smu.edu
Mariana Cherner	the neuropsychology of bilinugalism in low education groups	mcherner@ucsd.edu
Karen Emmorey	psycholinguistics of sign-language	emmorey@lcn.salk.edu
Christine Fennema-Notestine	clinical fMRI, sMRI, memory	fennema@ucsd.edu
Victor S. Ferreira	language production	ferreira@psy.ucsd.edu
Susie Flett	priming and TOTs	susanna.Flett@psy.ox.ac.uk
Matthew Finkbeiner	bilingual lexical access	msf@wjh.harvard.edu
Terry L. Jernigan	clinical fMRI, sMRI, memory	tjernigan@ucsd.edu
Judith F. Kroll	bilingualism	jfk7@psu.edu
Erica B. Michael	bilingualism	emichael@andrew.cmu.edu
Anat Prior	task and language switching	aprior@construct.haifa.ac.il
Jennie Pyers	psycholinguistics of ASL-English bilingualism	jpyers@wellesley.edu
David P. Salmon	aging, Alzheimer's disease, memory	dsalmon@ucsd.edu
Carson Schutze	syntax, morphology	cschutze@humanities.ucla.edu
Nina Silverberg	TOTs and word substitution errors	silverbergn@mail.nih.gov
Robin Thompson	psycholinguistics of sign-language	thompson@ling.ucsd.edu

Teaching BACK TO TOP

Graduate and undergraduate research assistants play a major role in helping me to carry out my research. The students listed below are (or were) especially hard working on one or more research projects and I consider them to be professional colleagues.

STUDENTS:

Lori-Ann Acenas	Senior Honor's Thesis	lorosace78@yahoo.com
Samel Angulo	Faculty Mentor Program	sangulo@sdcc15.ucsd.edu
Marina Bonanni	Senior Honor's Thesis	mbonanni@law.harvard.edu
Cynthia Cera	Senior Research Assistant	cmcera@gmail.com
Mary Champion	Faculty Mentor Program	mary.champion@gmail.com
Cassie Gipson	Faculty Mentor Program	cdgipson@ucsd.edu
Rosa I. Montoya	Senior Research Assistant	icantblevethis@gmail.com
Diane Goldenberg	Psychology Honors Project	dgoldenb@ucsd.edu
Tiffany Sandoval	Graduate Student; JDP Clinical Psychology	ticasand15@hotmail.com
Grace A. Gengoux (used to be Werner)	Research Project	gwerner@education.ucsb.edu
Gali Weissberger	Graduate Student; JDP Clinical Psychology	gweissbe@gmail.com
Jane You	Research Assistant	jane.you@gmail.com

Here is a current update on some students who have graduated: Lori-Ann became a speech pathologist; Sam obtained teaching credentials and also plans to attend graduate school in psychology; Marina graduated Harvard law and is practicing in LA; Rosa is now in graduate school to obtain a Masters degree in Family Therapy; Cynthia Cera plans to obtain a degree in Speech and Language Pathology, Grace got her PhD at UC, Santa Barbara and finished an internship at Yale, Mary worked in the lab for two years after graduating from UCSD, is taking a year off to teach in the Galapagos Islands and then will attend graduate school, Tiffany is on internship in L.A.
lab photo

From left to right: Cynthia Cera, Mary Champion, Tamar Gollan, Rosa Montoya, Jane You, Tiffany Sandoval, Diane Goldenberg.

Media Links

Bilinguals Find Proper Names Easiest to Remember (2005). Monitor on Psychology American Psychological Association, June, Volume 36(6), 12.

In Study, Bilingual Brains Stay Sharp Longer: Benefits for older people may include greater ability to focus amid distractions (2007; February, 7). The Sacramento Bee; By Carrie Peyton Dahlberg

Publications

Gollan, T.H., & Ferreira, V.S., (2009). Should I stay or should I switch? A cost-benefit analysis of voluntary language switching in young and aging bilinguals. Journal of Expermental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 35, 640-665.

Pyers, J.E., Gollan, T.H., & Emmorey, K. (2009). Bimodal bilinguals reveal the source of tip-of-the-tongue states. Cognition,

Sandoval, T.C., Gollan, T.H., Ferreira, V.S., & Salmon, D.P. (in press). What causes the bilingual disadvantage in verbal fluency: The dual-task analogy. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition

Rivera Mindt, M., Arentoft, A., Kubo Germano, K., D'Aquila, E., Scheiner, D., Pizzirusso, M., Sandoval, T.C., & Gollan, T.H. (2008). Neuropsychological, cognitive, and theoretical considerations for evaluation of bilingual individuals. Neuropsychology Review, 18, 255-268.

Gollan, T.H., Montoya, R.I., Cera, C.M., & & Sandoval, T.C., (2008). More use almost always means smaller a frequency effect: Aging, bilingualism, and the weaker links hypothesis. Journal of Memory and Language, 58, 787-814.

Emmorey, K., Borinstein, H. B. & Thompson, R., & Gollan, T.H. (2008). Bimodal bilingualism. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11, 43-61.

Gollan, T.H., Fennema-Notestine, C., (2007). What is it about bilingualism that affects BNT performance? A reply to commentaries The Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 13, 215-218.

Gollan, T.H., Fennema-Notestine, C., Montoya, R.I., & Jernigan, T.L. (2007). The Bilingual Effect on Boston Naming Test performance. The Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 13, 197-208.

Gollan, T.H., Salmon, D.P., Paxton, J.L. (2006). Word association in early Alzheimer's Disease. Brain and Language, 99, 289-303.

Gollan, T.H., & Brown, A.S. (2006). From tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) data to theoretical implications in two steps: When more TOTs means better retrieval. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 135, 462-483. see abstract

Finkbeiner, M., Gollan, T.H., & Caramazza, A. (2006). Lexical access in bilingual speakers: What’s the (hard) problem? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9, 153-166.

Michael, E., & Gollan, T.H. (2005). Being and becoming bilingual: Individual Differences and consequences for language production. In J.F. Kroll & A.M.B. de Groot (Eds.), The handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches (pp. 389-407). New York: Oxford University Press.

Thompson, R., Emmorey, K., Gollan, T.H. (2005). “Tip of the fingers” experiences by deaf signers: Insights into the organization of sign-based lexicon. Psychological Science, 16, 856-860. see abstract

Gollan, T.H., Montoya, R.I., Fennema-Notestine, C., Morris, S.K., (2005). Bilingualism affects picture naming but not picture classification. Memory & Cognition, 33, 1220-1234.abstract

Gollan, T.H., Bonanni, M.P., & Montoya, R.I. (2005). Proper names get stuck on bilingual and monolingual speakers tip-of-the-tongue equally often. Neuropsychology, 19, 278-287 see abstract

Gollan, T.H. & Acenas, L.A. (2004). What is a TOT?: Cognate and translation effects on tip-of-the-tongue states in Spanish-English and Tagalog-English bilinguals. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 30, 246-269. see abstract

Morris, S.K., Fennema-Notestine, Gollan, T.H., & Jernigan, T.L., (2003). Hispanic Bilinguals & English Monolinguals Show BOLD Activation Differences on an fMRI Picture Classification Paradigm. Neuroimage, 19, 1331.

Gollan, T.H., Montoya, R.I., Werner, G.A. (2002). Semantic and letter fluency in Spanish-English bilinguals. Neuropsychology, 16, 562-576. see abstract

Gollan, T., & Kroll, J. F. (2001). Bilingual lexical access. In B. Rapp (Ed.), The handbook of cognitive neuropsychology: What deficits reveal about the human mind (pp. 321-345). Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.

Gollan, T.H. & Frost, R. (2001). Two Routes to Grammatical Gender: Evidence from Hebrew. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 30, 627-651.

Gollan, T.H. & Silverberg, N.B. (2001) Tip-of-the-tongue states in Hebrew-English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 63-83.

Gollan, T.H., Forster, K.I., & Frost, R. (1997). Translation priming with different scripts: Masked priming with cognates and non-cognates in Hebrew-English bilinguals. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 23, 1122-1139.

Gollan, T.H., Forster, K.I., & Frost, R. (1995). Asymmetrical access to bilingual lexical representations. Brain & Language, 51, 134-137.

Sokol, S.M., Macaruso, P., & Gollan, T.H. (1994). Developmental dyscalculia and cognitive neuropsychology. Developmental Neuropsychology, 10, 413-441.

Submitted or In-prep Manuscripts BACK TO TOP

Gollan, T.H., Champion, M.K., You, J., Cera, C., Montoya, R.I., & Sandoval (submitted). The role of control in bilinguals of different langauge combinations.

Antón-Méndez, I. & Gollan, T.H. (submitted). Not just semantics: Cognate and frequency effects on semantic association in bilinguals.

Presentations BACK TO TOP

INVITED TALKS

Gollan, T.H. (May, 2010). Bilingualism, Aging, & Dementia. Linguistics Department, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL.

Gollan, T.H. (September, 2009). Bilingualism, Aging, & Dementia. Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Texas, Austin, TX.

Gollan, T.H. (May, 2009). Assessment of Dementia in Bilinguals. CME Conference: Alzheimer’s Disease: Update on Research, Treatment, and Care. ADRC, UCSD.

Gollan, T.H., (April, 2007). The Bilingual Effect on Speaking. Invited Colloquium. Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles.

Gollan, T.H., (January, 2007). What Bilinguals Tell Us About Aging and Language Production. Invited Colloquium (April, 2007). Department of Psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder.

Gollan, T.H. (August, 2006). Accessibility and Dual Tasking: The Many Effects That Bilingualism Has on Speaking. The Third International Workshop on Language Production, Chicago, IL.

Gollan, T.H. (November, 2004). What bilinguals tell us about language production. Symposium on Bilingualism; at the 45th annual meeting of the Pscyhonomic Society, Minneapolis, MN.

OTHER CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

Gollan, T. H., & Prior, A. (2009). Bilinguals Reveal the Role of Control in Language Processing. The 50^th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society. Boston, MA.

Sandoval, T., Gollan, T.H. Montoya, R.I., Champion, M., Cera, C., and Salmon, D.P. (February, 2009). Aging Effects on Cross-Language Intrusions: Why Octopus Slips into Animales. The 37th annual meeting of the International Neuropsychological Society, Atlanta, GA.

Schütze, C.T., Gollan, T.H. & Champion, M.K. (2008). Does you help you retrieve ewe? TOT evidence on frequency inheritance. Poster presented at the 14th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP), Cambridge, UK

Schütze, C.T., Gollan, T.H. & Champion, M.K. (2008). Tip-of-the-tongue elicitation of homophones: Against shared lexeme frequency effects. Poster presented at the Sixth International Conference on the Mental Lexicon, Banff, Canada.

Gollan, T.H. & Ferreira, V.S. (November, 2007). Natural Language Switching: Limits on the role of Inhibitory Control. The 48^th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society. Long Beach, CA.

Sandoval, T.C., Gollan, T.H., Ferreira, V.S., & Salmon, D.P. (February, 2007). Bilingualism affects verbal fluency: The dual-task analogy. The 35^th Annual meeting of the International Neuropsychological Society.

Brown, A.S. & Gollan, T.H. (November, 2003) Does aging really increase TOTs? It depends on the measure. Poster at the 44th Annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Vancouver, Canada.

Gollan, T.H., & Montoya, R.I. (2003, May). Proper Name Protection from TOTs: Bilingualism and the Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon. Paper presented at the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism. Phoenix, Arizona.

Gollan, T.H. (2002, November). What’s a bilingual: What’s a TOT? Paper presented at the 3rd semi-annual lexical processing workshop, Tucson, Arizona.

Gollan, T.H. (2002, May). When spatual and espátula are on the tip of your tongue: The assessment of verbal skills in Spanish-English bilinguals. Talk presented to the Departments of Psychology and Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University.

Gollan, T.H., Xavier E. Cagigas, Rascovsky, K., Salmon, D.P. (2002, April). The combined effects of aging and bilingualism on semantic and letter fluency. Poster presented at the Cognitive Aging Conference, Atlanta, Georgia.

Gollan, T.H., Montoya, R., & Werner, G. (2001, February). Semantic and verbal fluency in Spanish-English bilinguals. Poster presented at the 30th Annual Meeting of the International Neuropsychological Society. Toronto, Canada.

Gollan, T.H., Bonanni, M., & Burke, D.M. (November, 2001). Naturally Occurring Tip-of-the-tongue states in Bilinguals. The 41st Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Orlando, FL.

Silverberg, N., Gollan, T.H. & Garrett, M.F. (2001, March). Slips of the tongue or slips of the mind? Implications for laboratory induced speech errors. CUNY sentence processing conference, Philadelphia, PA.

Gollan, T.H., & Acenas, L.A. (2000, April). Tip-of-the-tongue incidence in Spanish-English and Tagalog-English bilinguals. Paper presented at the 3rd International Symposium on Bilingualism. Bristol, England.

Silverberg, N., Gollan, T.H., & Garrett, M.F., (1999, November). What you can get from a TOT and what NOT. The 40th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Los Angeles, CA.

Gollan, T.H., Perea, M., Bauer, A., (1999, November). On the road to two routes: Accessing gender in Spanish. The 40th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Los Angeles, CA.

Silverberg, N., Gollan, T.H., & Garrett, M.F., (1999, September). TOTs: In and out of the language machine. The 3rd annual meeting of the conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing, Edinburgh, Scottland.

Silverberg, N., & Gollan, T.H. (1998, January). Partial knowledge of TOT targets in Hebrew is implicit. The 26th annual meeting of the International Neuropsychological Society, Honolulu, Hawaii.

Gollan, T.H. & Frost, R. (1997, June). Conscious and unconscious access to grammatical gender in Hebrew. Paper read at the NAPH International Conference of Hebrew Language and Literature, Los Angeles, California.

Gollan, T.H., Silverberg, N., Martin, S., & Garrett, M.F. (1996). Bilingual Tip-of-the-Tongue states. Poster presented at the 37th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Chicago, IL.

Sokol, S.M. Macaruso, P., & Gollan, T.H. (1991, November). Patterns of impairment in developmental dyscalculia. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Selected Abstracts BACK TO TOP

Gollan, T.H., Salmon, D.P., Montoya, R.I., Da Pena, E. (submitted). Accessibility of the nondominant language in picture naming: A counterintuitive effect of dementia on bilingual language production
The current study tested the assumption that bilinguals with dementia regress to using primarily the dominant language. Spanish-English bilinguals with probable Alzheimer’s disease (AD; n=29), and matched bilingual controls (n=42) named Boston Naming Test pictures in their dominant and nondominant languages. Surprisingly, differences between patients and controls were larger using dominant-language than nondominant-language naming scores, and bilinguals with AD were either more likely than controls (in English-dominant bilinguals), or equally likely (in Spanish-dominant bilinguals), to name some pictures in the nondominant language that they could not produce in their dominant language. These findings suggest that dominant language testing may provide the best assessment of language deficits in bilingual AD, and argue against the common notion that the nondominant language is particularly susceptible to dementia. The greater vulnerability of the dominant language may reflect an increased probability of AD affecting richer semantic representations associated with dominant compared to nondominant language names.

Gollan, T.H., Ferreira, V.S., (2009). Should I stay or should I switch? A cost-benefit analysis of voluntary language switching in young and aging bilinguals, Journal of Expermental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 35, 640-665.
Bilinguals spontaneously switch languages in conversation even though laboratory studies reveal robust cued language switching costs. We investigated how voluntary switching costs might differ when switches are voluntary. Young (Experiments 1-2) and older (Experiment 3) Spanish-English bilinguals named pictures in three conditions: (a) dominant-language-only, (b) nondominant-language-only, and (c) using “whatever language comes to mind” (in Experiment 2, "using each language about half the time"). Most bilinguals, particularly balanced bilinguals, voluntarily mixed languages even though switching was costly. Unlike with cued switching, voluntary switching sometimes facilitated responses, switch-costs were not greater for the dominant language, and age effects on language-mixing and switching were limited. This suggests that the freedom to mix languages voluntarily allows unbalanced and older bilinguals to function more like balanced and young bilinguals. Voluntary switch costs reveal an expanded role for inhibitory control in bilingual language production, and imply a mandatory separation by language in bilingual lexical selection. back.

Gollan, T.H., Montoya, R.I., Cera, C.M., & & Sandoval, T.C., (2008). More use almost always means smaller a frequency effect: Aging, bilingualism, and the weaker links hypothesis. Journal of Memory and Language, 58, 787-814.
The “weaker links” hypothesis proposes that bilinguals are disadvantaged relative to monolinguals on speaking tasks because they divide frequency-of-use between two languages. To test this proposal we contrasted the effects of increased word use associated with monolingualism, language dominance, and increased age on picture naming times. In two experiments, younger and older bilinguals and monolinguals named pictures with high- or low-frequency names in English and (if bilingual) also in Spanish. In Experiment 1, slowing related to bilingualism and language dominance was greater for producing low- than high-frequency names. In Experiment 2, slowing related to aging was greater for producing low-frequency names in the dominant language, but when speaking the nondominant language, increased age attenuated frequency effects and age-related slowing was limited exclusively to high-frequency names. These results challenge competition based accounts of bilingual disadvantages in language production, and illustrate how between-group processing differences may emerge from cognitive mechanisms general to all speakers. back.

Gollan, T.H. & Brown, A. S., (2006) From tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) data to theoretical implications in two steps: When more TOTs means better retrieval. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 135 back. <>
Two experiments in which participants named pictured objects with difficult or easier names, and a reanalysis and review of published data, reveal that problematic measures used in previous studies obscured the implications of group differences in tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) rates. In Experiment 1, increased age led to more TOTs for difficult but not easy targets. In Experiment 2, bilinguals had more TOTs than monolinguals for easy targets but fewer TOTs for difficult targets. We develop a theoretically motivated measure that clarifies the implications of TOT data by linking all responses elicited in the TOT paradigm with either success or failure in completing two retrieval steps in current models of language production. The two-step analysis reveals a common mechanism for the age and bilingualism effects, and implies that age has both positive and negative effects on retrieval.

Thompson, R., Emmorey, K., & Gollan, T.H. (2005). “Tip of the fingers” experiences by deaf signers: Insights into the organization of sign-based lexicon. Psychological Science, 16, 856-860. back.
The “tip of the fingers” (TOF) phenomenon for sign language parallels the “tip of the tongue” (TOT) phenomenon for spoken language. During a TOF, signers are sure they know a sign but can’t retrieve it. Although some theories collapse semantics and phonology in sign language and thus predict that TOFs should not occur, TOFs were elicited in the current study. Like TOTs, TOFs often resolve spontaneously, commonly involve proper name targets, and frequently include partial access to phonology. Specifically, signers were most likely to retrieve handshape, location and orientation relative to the movement of a target sign. Signers also frequently recalled the first letter of a fingerspelled word. The existence of TOFs support 2-stage retrieval and a division between semantics and phonology in American Sign Language. Partial phonological information accessed during TOFs suggest that sign language lexicons are more simultaneous in nature than spoken-language lexicons.

Gollan, T.H., Bonanni, M.P., & Montoya, R.I. (2005). Proper names get stuck on bilingual and monolingual speakers tip-of-the-tongue equally often. Neuropsychology, 19, 278-287. back
Bilinguals’ virtually doubled processing load could lead to general difficulty producing all word forms, or to difficulty only in specific conditions. In Experiment 1, bilinguals and monolinguals completed diaries of naturally occurring tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs), and in Experiment 2 Spanish-English bilinguals and monolinguals produced the names of pictured objects and people’s names given their descriptions. Bilinguals reported the same number (or fewer) TOTs for proper names, but significantly more TOTs than monolinguals for other words. Using monolinguals as a baseline, proper names were harder to produce, thus for a harder task, bilinguals showed relatively better performance. Bilingual disadvantages may be limited to representing multiple forms for individual meanings; proper names improved naming because they have essentially the same form across languages.

Gollan, T.H., Montoya, R.I., Fennema-Notestine, C., Morris, S.K., (2005). Picture-naming and classification in monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals. Memory & Cognition, 33, 1220-1234 back
Bilinguals named pictures in their dominant language more slowly (and with more errors) relative to monolinguals. In contrast, bilinguals named the same pictures as quickly as monolinguals on the 5^th presentation (in Experiment 2), and classified them (as “human made” or “natural”) as quickly and accurately as monolinguals (in Experiment 1). In addition, bilinguals retrieved English picture names more quickly if they knew the name in both Spanish and English (based on a translation test that bilinguals completed after the timed tasks) and monolingual response times for the same materials suggested this finding was not simply because names that were easier to translate were easier in general. These findings suggest that bilinguals differ from monolinguals at a post-conceptual processing level, that implicit activation of lexical representations in the non-target language can facilitate retrieval in the target language, and that being bilingual is analogous to having a lexicon full of lower frequency words relative to monolinguals.

Gollan, T.H. & Acenas, L.A. (2004). What is a TOT?: Cognate and translation effects on tip-of-the-tongue states in Spanish-English and Tagalog-English bilinguals. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 30, 246-269. back
The authors induced tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs) for English words in monolinguals and bilinguals using picture stimuli with cognate (e.g., vampire, which is vampiro in Spanish) and noncognate (e.g., funnel, which is embudo in Spanish) names. Bilinguals had more TOTs than monolinguals unless the target pictures had translatable cognate names, and bilinguals had fewer TOTs for noncognates they were later able to translate. TOT rates for the same targets in monolinguals indicated that these effects could not be attributed to target difficulty. Two popular TOT accounts must be modified to explain cognate and translatability facilitation effects, and cross-language interference cannot explain bilinguals’ increased TOTs rates. Instead we propose that, relative to monolinguals, bilinguals are less able to activate representations specific to each language.

Gollan, T.H., Montoya, R.I., Werner, G.A. (2002). Semantic and letter fluency in Spanish-English bilinguals. Neuropsychology, 16, 562-576. back
Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals completed 12 semantic, 10 letter, and 2 proper name fluency categories. Bilinguals produced fewer exemplars than monolinguals on all category types, but the difference between groups was larger (and more consistent) on semantic categories. Bilinguals and monolinguals produced the same number of errors across all category types. The authors discuss 2 accounts of the similarities and differences between groups and the interaction with category type, including (a) cross-language interference and (b) relatively weak connections in the bilingual lexical system because of reduced use of words specific to each language. Surprisingly, bilinguals' fluency scores did not improve when they used words in both languages. This result suggests that voluntary language switching incurs a processing cost.

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