Verbal fluency in bilingual Lebanese adults: Is the prominent language advantage due to executive processes, language processes, or both?

Abstract

Although bilingualism is widespread, little data on verbal fluency tasks (VFTs) within bilingualism subtypes and the underlying mechanisms exist. The study’s objective was to explore executive and language processes in 10 semantic and letter VFTs and a set of language and executive tests among 100 elderly Arabic-French bilinguals from three bilingualism subgroups: Arabic-dominant, French-dominant, and balanced. We observed a prominent-language advantage for semantic and letter VFTs in French but not for letter VFTs in Arabic. This advantage in the VFT was associated with a sustained rate of late production, a higher percentage of specific words, a higher number of clusters, and a larger cluster size, and was related mainly to language processes. Our results suggest that the strategic search processes underlying VFTs operate on the two phonological output lexicons of bilinguals with similar characteristics in different languages and thus support the hypothesis of a single, centralized, strategic search process.

Keywords:

• Bilingualism
• clustering
• elderly
• Lebanese
• switching
• verbal fluency tasks

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank all the participants who volunteered in this study for their time and effort in completing our tests.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings are stored at Le Laboratoire de Neurosciences Fonctionnelles et Pathologiques (LNFP) UR UPJV 4559 in Amiens (France) and may be shared by the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

The study has been funded by Amiens University Hospital, by a grant from the French Ministry of Health (DGOS R1/2013/144) and by the Hubert Curien CEDRE program (file 44416PJ) implemented in France by the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs (MEAE) and the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (MESRI), and in Lebanon, by the Ministry of Education and Higher Education.