Listen carefully y presta atención: Selective attention in late L2 learners

The current study sought to understand the effects of two languages on selective attention in a complex listening environment. Adult second language learners of Spanish of high or low proficiency attended to one spoken message in one ear while ignoring another from their other ear in a dichotic listening task. The language of each message was either English or Spanish. While both proficiency level groups performed worse on the dichotic listening task when attending to their second language, the high proficiency group was significantly better than the low proficiency group at attending to their second language and ignoring their native language. These results imply that late second language learners can develop some of the same cognitive abilities, such as improved selective attention, as are associated with early proficient bilinguals. Selective Attention 3 Listen Carefully y Presta Atencion: Selective Attention in Late L2 Learners In today’s increasingly global world, there is more and more emphasis on fostering bilingualism and second language acquisition as skills to compete effectively. Just in the U.S. alone 26% of people can hold a conversation in a second language (McComb, 2001). Aside from the actual language skills of bilinguals and second language learners, psychologists have examined the related cognitive effects of speaking two or more languages. The majority of the body of research on this topic has used early proficient bilingual subjects who have acquired both languages very early in life, often learning at least one in the home setting (i.e. Goodman, Haith, Guttentag, & Rao, 1985; Bialystok & Martin, 2004; Prior & MacWhinney, 2009). There is another situation that deserves exploration: individuals who acquire their second language (L2) later in life. The critical period hypothesis or a more moderately labeled sensitive period has been hotly contested as to onset and offset maturational times (See Singleton, 2005 for a review), but that will not be discussed here as none of the myriad of proposed ages for an offset period is later than 16 years of age. Today, a large number of high school and college students are learning a second language in a classroom setting sometime after that age, so regardless of the true offset of the sensitive period, it is likely to have passed before these students began learning their second language. In 2003, the U.S. Education Department released that the most recent survey which had been conducted in 2000 found 42% of high school student enrolled in foreign language education classes (Snyder & Hoffman, 2003). The linguistic skills of these multilingual speakers are beyond the scope of this project, but an important line of research explores the possibility that these late L2 learners will experience similar cognitive effects not directly related to Selective Attention 4 language use. In the present study, I further investigate the effects by focusing on selective attention in late second language learners. Individuals are often required to focus on just a few things in their environment, such as listening to the person to whom one is talking while surrounded by other conversations or music. This is complex enough if all these auditory inputs are in an individual’s native language, but some listening situations include several languages. Do adult second language learners deal with this problem successfully, or does the addition of their second language make it too difficult? The basic question includes a necessary understanding of several cognitive processes. These foundations include selective attention, the dichotic listening methodology, cognitive load, and the abilities of proficient bilinguals.