68 Bilinguals' Perceived Workloads on The Boston Naming Test

Abstract

Objective:

The Boston Naming Test (BNT) is a 60-item confrontation naming task requiring participants to name a series of pictures. Prior research has shown that bilingual children have smaller vocabularies than monolinguals and that this effect continues into adulthood. Numerous studies have confirmed that bilingual adults name fewer pictures correctly than monolinguals on the BNT. Research also shows that self-reported workload correlates with neuropsychological test performance and that estimates of workload provide additional information regarding cognitive outcomes. Hardy and Wright (2018) conditionally validated a measure of perceived mental workload called the NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX; Hart & Staveland 1988) with healthy adults on a neuropsychological test (i.e., the Tower of Hanoi). Research also shows that bilinguals report higher perceived workloads on cognitive tasks compared to monolinguals. Although this work has recently extended to other tests, to our knowledge, the workload profile of the BNT remains relatively unexplored. We evaluated BNT performance and perceived workload via the NASA-TLX in monolinguals and bilinguals. We predicted that monolinguals would outperform bilinguals on the BNT, but that bilinguals would report higher workloads.

Participants and Methods:

The study sample consisted of 84 healthy participants (36 monolinguals, 48 bilinguals) with a mean age of 28.94 (SD = 10.76). Participants completed the standard 60-item BNT in English. The NASA-TLX scale was utilized to evaluate perceived workload across six subscales. The NASA-TLX was also completed in English after the completion of the BNT. ANOVAs were used to test BNT performance and perceived workload ratings between our language groups.

Results:

We found that monolinguals performed better on the BNT compared to bilinguals, p =.001, np² = 24. However, bilinguals reported exerting more effort when completing the BNT compared to monolinguals, p =.002, np2 = .11. Additionally. bilinguals also experienced more frustration when completing the BNT compared to monolinguals, p =.034, np2 = .05.

Conclusions:

As expected, results revealed that monolinguals outperformed bilingual participants on the BNT. However, bilinguals exerted more effort on the BNT and reported the BNT to be more frustrating. A possible reason for bilinguals underperforming and reporting higher perceived workloads on the BNT may be because correct responses were only accepted in English. This may have caused bilingual speakers to exert increased effort to complete the task in a non-native language. In turn, this increased effort likely increased cognitive load and led to higher frustration levels. Further research is needed to confirm our findings and support the idea that bilingualism leads to perceiving greater effort and frustration, and to determine whether there are subgroup differences in BNT performances among bilingual individuals (e.g., English learned as a first language compared to English learned as a second language).