[PS-2.9] Metacognitive processing in statistical learning is modulated by bilingualism

Ordin, M. 1, 2 , Polyanskaya, L. 1 & Soto, D. 1, 2

1 BCBL
2 IKERBASQUE - Basque Foundation for Science

In three experiments, we assessed the effect of bilingualism on metacognitive processing in the artificial language learning task. Following a study phase in which participants were exposed to the artificial language, segmentation performance was assessed by means of a dual forced-choice recognition test followed by confidence judgments. We used a signal detection approach to estimate type-1 performance (i.e., ability to discriminate statistical words vs. foils constructed from the same syllables), and type-2 metacognitive performance (i.e. the ability to discriminate the correctness of the type-1 decisions by confidence ratings). The material in the first two experiments varied in the difficulty level to segment the language. The results showed that bilinguals and monolinguals do not differ in type-1 recognition performance, but across the two experiments metacognitive performance was higher in bilinguals compared to monolinguals. The results also show that bilingualism improves metacognitive evaluation of performance in linguistic domains. We suggest that the improvement in metacognitive performance stems from enhanced error monitoring abilities in the language domain, evidenced by lower confidence rating assigned to incorrect trials by bilinguals compared to monolinguals. In the third experiment, we looked at different aspects of bilingualism that could modulate individual metacognitive performance in statistical learning tasks.