QML - Week 3

Inference, uncertainty and variability

Stefano Coretta

Inference

Bilingual advantage: myth or reality?

Bilingual advantage hypothesis

Bilingual individuals 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)

Bilingual icons created by Freepik - Flaticon

Bilingual advantage: inconclusive!

Research both for and against the bilingual advantage hypothesis. (Franck et al. 2024; Garraffa et al. 2023).

Inconclusive does not mean “there is no bilingual advantage”.

Doubt icons created by Freepik - Flaticon

Group activity

Instructions

• 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

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.

Images by Stickers.

Group activity

Instructions

• 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.

Research paper icons created by Graphiqa - Flaticon. Discussion icons created by Freepik - Flaticon.

Many analysts, one data set

Do speakers acoustically modify utterances to signal atypical word combinations? (Coretta et al. 2023)

30 teams

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.

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.

Many analysts, one data set

Coretta et al. (2023)

GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS

aka RESEARCHER’S DEGREES OF FREEDOM

Photo by Ben Mathis Seibel on Unsplash

References

Coretta, Stefano, Joseph V. Casillas, Simon Roessig, 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. CALEC / TBR Books.

Garraffa, Maria, Antonella Sorace, Maria Vender, and John W. Schwieter. 2023. Bilingualism Matters: Language Learning Across the Lifespan. 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.