[SOUND] Some of the work that we've done in our laboratory has also addressed this question. And what we wanted to do is to look at what happens when we compare a first and a second language. Now obviously that can be quite complicated. Right? Because how do we compare a first and a second language, and still keep language proficiency controlled? So if we take the first language of someone, how do we make sure that their ability in that first language approximates the ability in the second language of another person? If someone has a first language and they speak it continuously and they're educated in that language, their proficiency in general will be higher. Their ability will be higher than someone who learned it later in life. But, we did have the opportunity to do this because there are a group of Spanish speakers in the US who actually become better in English, and they acquire more proficiency in English across a number of measures. If we asked them to name pictures, if we asked them to say words into a microphone, they're faster in English than Spanish. There're many other aspects of processing, where they show increased speed or accuracy for English, the second language. And this finding has been replicated in other laboratories across the United States. So they're a group of second language learners that are better in their second language. And we compared them to people who had learned Spanish, who are English native speakers, who had learned Spanish sometime in middle school, like 11 to 16 or junior high, right? Right before high school. And were actually better of course in English than Spanish, but Spanish was their second language. So we could actually take two groups who had Spanish, one as a first language, and the other as a second language, and compare them directly, right? While still matching them on how well they spoke Spanish.
