QML - Week 2

Inference, uncertainty and variability

Stefano Coretta

Inference

Bilingual advantage: myth or reality?

“Bilingual advantage” refers to the hypothesis that bilinguals possess a cognitive advantage over monolinguals due to greater cognitive control implied in using more than one language (Poarch and Krott 2019; Samuel et al. 2018).

• However, research has argued both for and against the existence of the bilingual advantage.

• We can say research has been “inconclusive” (Franck, Faloppa, and Marinis 2024; Garraffa et al. 2023).

Inconclusive!

Note that inconclusive does not mean “there is no bilingual advantage”. It means we do not know.

Group activity

• Discuss reasons for which research on the bilingual advantage is inconclusive.

• You’ll share what you discussed in a Wooclap poll in the next slide.

Share your thoughts

Group activity

• Go to https://stefanocoretta.shinyapps.io/bisim/.

• Get one sample by clicking on the button. PLEASE, click only once!

• Look at the sample data. Is there a bilingual advantage?

Share your conclusion

Uncertainty and variability

• Uncertainty is a characteristic of each observation of a phenomenon, due to measurement error or because we cannot directly measure what we want to measure.
• Variability is found among different observations of the same phenomenon, due to natural fluctuations and measurement error.

Group activity

• Each group will get a research card with a short literature review and a small data set.

• Answer the following question:

  Are younger infants better at discriminating non-native phonetic contrasts than older infants?

Share your answer

Many analysts, one data set

• You just experienced a form of “many analysts, one data set” scenario.

• Coretta et al. (2023) asked 30 teams to answer the same research question with the same data.

  Do speakers acoustically modify utterances to signal atypical word combinations?

  • Participants had to instruct a confederate to move a cube on top of an object. The object either had a typical or atypical colour: YELLOW vs BLUE banana.

• We gave the data to all teams and they sent us back:

  • 109 individual analyses—a bit more than 3 analyses per team!
  • Nine teams out of the thirty (30%) reported to have found at least one statistically reliable effect.

Many analysts, one data set

References

Coretta, Stefano, Joseph V. Casillas, Simon Roessig, Michael Franke, Byron Ahn, Ali H. Al-Hoorie, Jalal Al-Tamimi, et al. 2023. “Multidimensional Signals and Analytic Flexibility: Estimating Degrees of Freedom in Human-Speech Analyses.” Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science 6 (3). https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459231162567.

Franck, Julie, Federico Faloppa, and Theodoros Marinis, eds. 2024. Myths and Facts about Multilingualism. Bilingualism Matters 1. New York: CALEC / TBR Books.

Garraffa, Maria, Antonella Sorace, Maria Vender, and John W. Schwieter. 2023. Bilingualism Matters: Language Learning Across the Lifespan. Cambridge ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Poarch, Gregory J., and Andrea Krott. 2019. “A Bilingual Advantage? An Appeal for a Change in Perspective and Recommendations for Future Research.” Behavioral Sciences 9 (9): 95. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs9090095.

Samuel, Steven, Karen Roehr-Brackin, Hyensou Pak, and Hyunji Kim. 2018. “Cultural Effects Rather Than a Bilingual Advantage in Cognition: A Review and an Empirical Study.” Cognitive Science 42 (7): 2313–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12672.