Please join us next Thursday, October 10th for our first meeting of the fall quarter, from 12-1:30 in Beecher 101. Lunch will be provided.
Dr. Brooke Macnamara (Princeton University) will present her talk entitled: “Skill Acquisition and Expertise Across Domains and Within Bilingualism”
Individuals vary considerably in the rate at which they acquire new skills. Traditionally, researchers investigating predictors of variance in performance focus either on general cognitive abilities or on experiential factors. In this talk, I propose that while both general cognitive abilities and experience predict performance, the more interesting questions are when and why does the relative explanatory power of these predictors vary? In other words, what moderates these relationships? I will introduce a novel variable—predictability of the task environment—and demonstrate its influence on variance in performance across domains and within bilingual processing tasks. My research also investigates the bi-directionality of the cognitive abilities–experiential factors relationship by examining cognitive enhancements resulting from bilingual experience (i.e., the bilingual advantage). I will introduce a second novel variable—bilingual management demands—and demonstrate their influence on intra-individual psychological processes. Based on my findings from studies conducted in both the laboratory and in the field, from cross-sections, longitudinal data, and meta-analyses, I conclude that 1) the relative explanatory power of general cognitive abilities and experiential factors on performance variance depends on the predictability of the task environment, and 2) the type and extent of cognitive enhancements resulting from bilingual experience depend on the type and extent of the individual’s bilingual processing demands and experience with those demands.