Language, Attention and Individual Differences

Abstract

Every person has a unique cognitive profile. Biological makeup, life experiences and different abilities affect cognitive processing. Therefore, cognitive processing models and their predictions should not be generalized to all cases without due thought. Everybody's attention and linguistic capacities are constrained by several psychological, social and cultural factors. Any theory of attention--language interaction has to consider how individual differences manifest in such interactions. All speakers and listeners are not equal in terms of the amount of uses of language or the cognitive environments they find themselves in. This chapter deals with how one's linguistic profile can fine tune attentional processes or vice versa. The chapter will explore how bilingualism affects one's cognitive system, particularly the executive control system and attention in a range of situations. The chapter also discusses how formal literacy level as a cognitive predictor influences attentional mechanisms. These considerations are important in today's world of changing socio-cultural boundaries and greater heterogeneity in human contacts. The chapter will also consider language users from diverse linguistic traditions, who speak lesser studied languages and may find themselves operating with a completely different set of cognitive structures. In earlier chapters, we saw that attention is required for several language activities; here, we will see that language use in turn affects attention.