Version 4.2

Lecture: Language control in late bilinguals

Evidence from bottom-up and top-down target selection tasks

Bilingualism is a widespread phenomenon across the world. It is therefore a central subject of linguistic research, which can potentially provide invaluable insights into cognitive processes of various kinds. The ability of bilinguals to switch from one language to the other is a phenomenon particularly important for the investigation of bilingualism within a cognitive research approach. Despite the fact that code switching in bilinguals occurs with ease and rather subconsciously, investigations suggest that such behavior is associated with effort for the brain, the so-called switching costs (see e.g. Mosca, & de Bot, 2017; Thomas, & Allport, 2000). Brain imaging methods can provide further information on the neuronal correlates and processes involved (see e.g. Blanco-Elorrieta, Emmorey, & Pylkkänen, 2017; Branzi, Della Rosa, Canini, Costa, & Abutalebi, 2016; Calabria, Costa, Green, & Abutalebi, 2018; Crinion, et al., 2006), psycholinguistic experiments enable insights into the processing of bilingual production and perception (see e.g. Aparicio, Heidlmayr, & Isel, 2017; Grosjean, 1998), and different models aim to describe different aspects of bilingual language processing (see e.g. Dijkstra, & van Heuven, 2002; Green, 1998; Li, 2013). The purpose of the present study is to shed light on bilingual language control in late bilinguals. It does so by conducting a target-selection experiment consisting of linguistic and non-linguistic items. Findings show that the direction of the processing stream plays a crucial role and alters the reaction times significantly. To interpret these findings, Levelt et al’s (1999) model of speech processing was adapted and modified.

Literature
Aparicio, X., Heidlmayr, K., & Isel, F. (2017). Inhibition Efficiency in Highly Proficient Bilinguals and Simultaneous Interpreters: Evidence from Language Switching and Stroop Tasks. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 46:1427-1451.

Blanco-Elorrieta, E., Emmorey, K., & Pylkkänen, L. (2018). Language switching decomposed through MEG and evidence from bimodal bilinguals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(39):9708–9713.

Branzi, F. M., Della Rosa, P. A., Canini, M., Costa, A., & Abutalebi, J. (2016). Language Control in Bilinguals: Monitoring and Response Selection. Cerebral Cortex, 26(6):2367–2380.

Calabria, M., Costa, A., Green, D. W., & Abutalebi, J. (2018). Neural basis of bilingual language control. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. In Press.

Crinion, J., Turner, R., Grogan, A., Hanakawa, T., Noppeney, U., Devlin, J. T., … Price, C. J. (2006). Language control in the bilingual brain. Science, 312(5779):1537–1540.

Dijkstra, T., & van Heuven, W. J. B. (2002). The Architecture of the Bilingual Word Recognition System: From Identification to Decision. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5(3):175–197.

Green, D. W. (1998). Mental control of the bilingual lexico-semantic system. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1(2):67–81.

Grosjean, F. (1998). Studying bilinguals: Methodological and conceptual issues. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1(2):131–149.

Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22(1):1–38.

Li, P. (2013). Computational modeling of bilingualism: How can models tell us more about the bilingual mind?. Bilingualism, 16(2):241–245.

Mosca, M., & Bot, K. de. (2017). Bilingual Language Switching: Production vs. Recognition. Front. Psychol. 8:934.

Thomas, M. S. C., & Allport, A. (2000). Language Switching Costs in Bilingual Visual Word Recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 43(1):44–66.

Info

Day: 2019-05-24
Start time: 14:00
Duration: 00:30
Room: 103/ H80
Track: Neuro and Psycholinguistics
Language: en

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