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Academic Paper

Title:	The effects of first- and second-language proficiency on conflict resolution and goal maintenance in bilinguals: Evidence from reaction time distributional analyses in a Stroop task
Author:	Chi-Shing Tse
Institution:	Chinese University of Hong Kong
Author:	Jeanette Altarriba
Institution:	University at Albany, State University of New York
Linguistic Field:	Applied Linguistics; Language Acquisition
Abstract:	By administering a Stroop task to college-student bilinguals varied in self-rated first- (L1) and second-language (L2) proficiency, the current study examined the effects of L1 and L2 proficiencies on selective attention performance. We conducted ex-Gaussian analyses to capture the modal and positive-tail components of participants' reaction time distributions. Both L1 and L2 proficiencies were associated with a shift of reaction time distributions in incongruent trials, relative to congruent trials, and the tail size of reaction time distributions regardless of trial types. This suggests that bilinguals' L1 and L2 proficiencies could affect their Stroop performance via modulating their conflict resolution and goal maintenance abilities.

	This article appears in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition Vol. 15, Issue 3, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST .

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