Bilingualism and cognition: The impact of age of acquisition, language use, and proficiency in cognitively unimpaired older adults

Bilingualism and cognitive resilience: Online episodic memory for auditory verbal material

Cognitive reserve refers to the ability to maintain cognitive functioning despite aging or neuropathology. Episodic memory is thought to better represent the neural basis of cognitive reserve than other cognitive abilities or static proxies such as education. The present study examines whether bilingual language experience is associated with enhanced episodic memory for auditorily presented verbal material, using an online paradigm modeled on established clinical memory measures. Participants complete an episodic memory task via Pavlovia involving auditory encoding of word lists, followed by immediate and delayed recall. This task demands auditory perception, phonological encoding, and memory consolidation, closely paralleling verbal episodic memory measures commonly used in cognitive reserve research. Language experience is assessed using background questionnaires capturing age of acquisition, daily language use, and proficiency tests. The experiment is underway, with a target sample of about 60 adult participants. We predict that bilingual participants will demonstrate higher recall accuracy and reduced forgetting over the delay compared to monolinguals and that greater balance and intensity of bilingual language use will be associated with stronger episodic memory performance. By adopting an episodic memory structure shown to predict cognitive reserve and implementing it with auditory verbal stimuli, this student-led project contributes to acoustically grounded approaches to bilingual cognition using scalable online methods.

Cognitive and Neural Preservation in Older Language Learners: The CNPOLL Framework

Verbal fluency across the lifespan: The role of cognitive reserve and expression suppression in the first 10-s performance.

OBJECTIVE The study examined verbal fluency performance using a 10-s paradigm in young and older adults, focusing on the role of cognitive reserve (CR) and emotion regulation. METHOD Thirty-eight young adults and 44 healthy older adults completed phonemic, semantic, and emotional fluency tasks, together with standardized assessments of vocabulary, working memory, CR, and emotion regulation. Linear mixed-effects models were used to examine task- and group-related effects, as well as the contribution of established cognitive predictors (vocabulary, backward digit span, and education). Additional models tested the role of CR and expressive suppression, the latter examined in relation to emotional fluency. RESULTS Performance differed across fluency types (ηp² = .39, i.e., semantic > phonemic > emotional) and between age groups (ηp² = .11), with young adults outperforming older adults. Vocabulary emerged as the strongest predictor (ηp² = .07), whereas working memory showed only a trend-level effect once lexical knowledge was controlled for (ηp² = .04). Education did not uniquely predict performance. Within emotional fluency, positive emotions elicited higher accuracy than negative emotions (ηp² = .03), and older adults were impaired for negative prompts. Expressive suppression negatively predicted emotional fluency accuracy independently of age (ηp² = .10). Within the older group, higher CR was associated with better overall fluency performance (ηp² = .11). CONCLUSIONS The 10-s fluency paradigm retains sensitivity to age-related differences while emphasizing rapid, automatic retrieval processes. The results underscore the protective role of CR and identify expressive suppression as a key affective modulator of emotional fluency. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Working memory, updating and vocabulary development in Albanian-speaking children aged 8 and 10: the primacy of socioeconomic status.

This study examined the relationship between receptive vocabulary, working memory processes, non-verbal intelligence, and socioeconomic status (SES) in Albanian-speaking children during middle childhood. The research was motivated by the linguistic characteristics of Albanian, a morphologically rich and orthographically transparent language that provides an informative context for examining how cognitive resources and environmental factors contribute to vocabulary acquisition. A sample of 168 children aged 8-10 years completed measures of receptive vocabulary (British Picture Vocabulary Scale), verbal working memory (Listening Recall), updating ability (N-back task), and non-verbal intelligence (Raven's Progressive Matrices). Descriptive statistics, correlational analyses, multiple regression, and moderation analyses were conducted to examine the associations among these variables. Results indicated that receptive vocabulary was positively correlated with age, SES, intelligence, and verbal working memory. Multiple regression analysis revealed that parental SES was the only significant predictor of receptive vocabulary performance, accounting for the largest unique proportion of variance. Working memory showed a modest association with receptive vocabulary, whereas updating ability was not a significant predictor. Moderation analyses further demonstrated that SES significantly moderated the relationship between working memory and receptive vocabulary, such that the association was stronger among children from higher SES backgrounds.

Brief tests for the assessment of language-executive functions: normative data for the Italian population

Bilingualism as a potential protective factor for cognition and language in brain tumor

Bilingualism modulates structural and functional brain properties and hence sculpts cognition and language. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether this effect of bilingualism on cognition and language processing is preserved when a primary left-dominant hemisphere brain tumor is present. Results from a large sample of individuals ( n  = 119) showed higher performance of bilinguals in lexico-semantic, nonword repetition, verbal fluency and attention/short-term memory tasks at the presurgery assessment. The beneficial effect of bilingualism on semantic knowledge, nonword repetition and phonological verbal fluency was maintained regardless of the type of brain tumor, whereas the bilingual effect on semantic verbal fluency was influenced by the type of tumor. Moreover, the machine learning results indicated that the lexico-semantic association task was the best predictor of bilingualism. Our results provided the first evidence of bilingualism as a protective factor for cognition of patients with a brain tumor diagnosis, most probably for language-learning abilities.