The Association for Psychological Science recently announced the winners of the “Share your Science” competition, in which researchers create short social media posts about their work.
One of the winners was Dr. Ren Salig (University of Michigan) who created a short Instagram video about their work on bilingualism. Let’s watch it, and come back here to answer some questions about it. The video is on Instagram and is just a couple of minutes long.
This research studied situations in which groups of bilingual people switch back and forth between languages when speaking with each other.
Photo: Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock
The research Dr. Salig describes is an experiment. As you rewatch the video, identify the answers to the following questions:
a) What quality did all of the participants in this study have in common?
b) The participants were listening to different scenarios of spoken language. What was the independent variable–that is, how did the scenarios differ? Do you think this IV was manipulated as independent groups or within groups? Why?
c) What was the dependent variable in these studies?
d) What do the results typically show? (Sketch a little bar graph!)
e) How do you know that this was an experiment? Can we rule out explanations such as “bilinguals just have better memory in general”?
f) Are you bilingual? If so, can you relate to Dr. Salig’s finding that groups of bilingual friends often switch languages when they speak together?