Drawing on the adaptive control hypothesis, we examined whether older adults’ bilingual interactional contexts of conversational exchanges would predict important indices of executive functions (EF). We assessed participants’ engagement in each bilingual interactional context – single-language, dual-language, and dense code-switching – and their performance on a series of nonverbal EF measures. Sixty-nine healthy older adults (Mage = 70.39 years; ages 60–93) were recruited from local community centers. We found that the dense code-switching context was associated with enhanced overall EF, but not individual facets of EF (inhibitory control, shifting, and updating). These findings held true when we controlled for a host of covariates. Our findings shed light on aging bilinguals’ interactional contexts as crucial bilingual experiences that modulate overall EF. Given that bilingualism is a multidimensional construct, rather than a unidimensional variable, our study underscores the importance of more fine-grained operationalisation of bilingualism when studying its impacts on EF.

中文翻译：

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双语互动环境预测老年人的执行功能

借鉴自适应控制假设，我们检查了老年人的对话交流的双语互动环境是否会预测执行功能 (EF) 的重要指标。我们评估了参与者在每种双语交互环境（单语言、双语言和密集语码转换）中的参与度，以及他们在一系列非语言 EF 测量中的表现。69 名健康老年人 (M年龄= 70.39 岁；60-93 岁）是从当地社区中心招募的。我们发现密集的代码转换上下文与增强的整体 EF 相关，但与 EF 的各个方面（抑制控制、转移和更新）无关。当我们控制大量协变量时，这些发现成立。我们的研究结果揭示了老年双语者的互动环境是调节整体 EF 的关键双语体验。鉴于双语是一个多维结构，而不是一维变量，我们的研究强调了在研究双语对 EF 的影响时更细粒度操作化双语的重要性。