The Effects Of Bilingual Experience On Cognitive Control For College Students Under Emotional Background

Cognitive control is a process in which individual processes information related to specific task flexibly while inhibits irrelevant information,according to program requirements.Bilingual experience and emotion are very important among the various influence factors of the cognitive control.With the increasing population of bilinguals around the world,the impacts of bilingual experience and emotional stimuli on cognitive control have been concerned widely.However,the results of the studies on the impact effect are inconsistent,especially for the efforts of different sub-components of cognitive control.Then the inconsistency in cross-task and cross-component studies provides a basis of comparing between different subcomponents of cognitive control.Moreover,the research results of emotional stimuli impact effect on cognitive control are also inconsistent.In addition,the factors,such as the acquisition years of the second language,vocabulary,intelligence and family economic conditions of the individual,etc are controlled and balanced as additional variables in the research of the impact of bilingual experience on cognitive control currently,but does not the emotional state during the cognitive control task.Hence,through adding emotional information to cognitive control tasks,this paper investigates whether there is an interaction between the impacts of bilingual experience and emotional stimuli on cognitive control,as well as the difference between impacts of them on sub-components of the cognitive control.Using the English grade test scores as a grouping index of English proficiency,the participants of college students who have not passed the CET-6 are denoted as unskilled groups,while those who passed the English Proficiency Test-8 were defined as proficient groups.Then the proficient group includes 24 subjects and the unskilled group includes 32 subjects.The Go/Nogo paradigm with emotional information is used to measure the inhibitory control component of cognitive control,while the Flanker paradigm with emotional information is used to measure the conflict monitoring component of cognitive control.The experiments are designed as two-factor mixed experiment type: 2(language type: proficient,unskilled)× 3(emotional type: happy,neutral,sad),in which the language type is used as inter-subject variable while the emotional type is internal variable.The performance of the attention to facial expression pictures is tested by emotional picture recognition task.By analyzing the behavioral indicators of different cognitive control tasks under the three emotional stimulation conditions,the effects of emotional stimulation and bilingual experience on cognitive control were explored in this paper.The research results are shown as below.In the inhibition control task with emotional information,the response of the proficient group was faster than that of the unskilled group;the inhibition control ability under the sad stimulation condition was significantly lower than that under the happy and neutral stimulation conditions;the interaction effect between proficiency and emotion type is not significant.While in the conflict monitoring task with emotional information,there is an interaction between proficiency and emotional type in the total response time and the correct rate effect;the correct rate effect of the proficient group under the sad stimulation condition was significantly lower than that of the happy and neutral conditions;the correct rate effect of the proficient group under neutral conditions was significantly higher than that of the unskilled group;the response times of unskilled group under happy and sad conditions are faster than that of the neutral condition;the proficient group responded faster than the unskilled group under the three emotional stimulation conditions.And in the emotional picture recognition task,the frequency of recognition of sad pictures was significantly higher than that of happy and neutral.In summary,the conclusions of this study drawn out are as followed.Firstly,language proficiency and emotional stimuli will affect the inhibition control,exactly as that the inhibition control ability of the proficient group is better than unskilled group,and negative emotion stimulation has an inhibitory effect.Secondly,there is an interaction between the effects of language proficiency and emotional stimulation on conflict monitoring;the proficient group has better conflict monitoring ability than the unskilled group under neutral stimulation conditions and the negative emotion stimulus suppresses the conflict monitoring ability of the proficient group.Thirdly,language proficiency and emotional stimulation have impact effects on cognitive control for English-Chinese bilingual students,with bilingual advantage effect and negative emotion suppression effect overall.