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Chapter 8. Effects of cognitive control, lexical robustness, and frequency of codeswitching on language switching
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This study explores the effects of individual differences on the production of words when switching between a strong and significantly weaker language. Variables of interest included non-linguistic cognitive control, lexical robustness (i.e., the size and strength of the lexicon), and frequency of codeswitching in daily life. Seventy university students who were English (L1) speakers learning Spanish (L2) and French (L3) completed a language questionnaire and participated in: a Simon task; lexical robustness measures in all three languages; and a picture-naming task involving cued language switching between the L1 and L2. The results suggested that cognitive control and L2 lexical robustness had modulating effects on language switching, but only in limited cases. L3 lexical robustness did not affect L1-L2 language switching, however, both L1 and L2 lexical robustness had differential influences, with smaller differences between L1 and L2 switch costs being related to higher levels of L2. Counterintuitively, participants who reported more frequently codeswitching in daily life showed larger switch costs in both L1 and L2. We discuss the implications for these findings and emphasize the importance of examining a more comprehensive spectrum of variables that explain how multilingual experiences shape the networks that support cognition and language regulatory processes.
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... This hypothesis also takes into account the foreign language effect (FLE) on the causality illusion (Díaz-Lago & Matute, 2019b). Although the literature on the FLE is inconclusive in explaining this phenomenon (Circi et al., 2021), many functional bilingual models are centred on cognitive control mechanisms (Schwieter & Ferreira, 2016). We hypothesize that not all types of processing disfluency are equally effective in activating the engagement of system two. ...
When a subjective experience of difficulty is associated with a mental task, people tend to engage in systematic and deliberative reasoning, which can reduce the usage of intuitive and effortless thinking that gives rise to cognitive biases. One such bias is the illusion of causality, where people perceive a causal link between two unrelated events. Díaz-Lago and Matute (2019a) found that a superficial perceptual feature of the task could modulate the magnitude of the illusion (i.e., a hard-to-read font led to a decrease in the magnitude of the illusion). The present study explored the generalizability of the idea that perceptual disfluency can lead to a decrease in the magnitude of the illusion. In the first experiment, we tested whether a physical-perceptual manipulation of the stimuli, specifically the contrast between the written text and the background, could modulate the illusion in a contingency learning task. The results of the online experiment (N=200) showed no effect of contrast on the magnitude of the illusion, despite our manipulation successfully induced task fluency or disfluency. Building upon this null result, our second experiment (N=100) focused on manipulating the font type, in the attempt to replicate the results obtained by Díaz-Lago and Matute (2019a). In contrast to their findings, we found no discernible effect of font type on the magnitude of the illusion, even though this manipulation also effectively induced variations in task fluency or disfluency. These results underscore the notion that not all categories of (dis)fluency in cognitive processing wield a modulatory influence on cognitive biases, and they call for a re-evaluation and a more precise delineation of the (dis)fluency construct.
... 38-39). Recent research has shown some support for this metaphor, with a few caveats that identify critical and modulating factors such as how supportive their speech community is of the two languages (Lauchlan et al. 2013), language immersion (Baus et al. 2013;Linck et al. 2009) and whether they often code switch in daily lives (Green and Wei 2014;Schwieter and Ferreira 2016). ...
... If this is the case, various experiences with language mode may confound the implications for a bilingual advantage. In order to study the nature of these effects more accurately and directly, researchers must take into account speakers' language experiences thoroughly (Luk and Bialystok, 2013;Schwieter and Ferreira, 2016). These experiences are modulated by the limited capacity and goaldirected selectivity of the human executive functions. ...
For bilinguals, it is argued that a cognitive advantage can be linked to the constant management and need for conflict resolution that occurs when the two languages are co-activated (Bialystok, 2015). Language mode (Grosjean, 1998, 2001) is a significant variable that defines and shapes the language experiences of bilinguals and consequently, the cognitive advantages of bilingualism. Previous work, however, has not sufficiently tested the effects of language mode on the bilingual experience. In this brief conceptual analysis, we discuss the significance of language mode in bilingual work on speech perception, production, and reading. We offer possible explanations for conflicting findings and ways in which future work should control for its modulating effects.
This chapter reviews research on bilingualism and multilingualism discussing working memory, the multilingual lexicon, language control and lexical selection, and the cognitive advantages of bi- and multilingualism. It focuses on the cognitive characteristics of multilingualism, although it certainly can be interpreted from sociolinguistic perspectives. In cognitive studies on interpreting, bilingualism is one of the research areas that can provide insight to understand how translation and interpreting is performed, along with research on language comprehension and production, discourse processing, memory, attention, expertise, and complex skill performance. Interpreting implies that bilingualism is “the substrate for considering all manifestations of translation ability”. In this sense, it seems important to discuss how translation and interpreting studies (TIS) provide insights into research on bilingualism, especially related to mental representation and language control processes.
This chapter discusses the manner in which recent developments in mental lexicon research have created new implications for the understanding of how multilingualism develops and how it is maintained across the lifespan. It considers multilinguals to be persons who are able to understand and speak two or more languages. The chapter discusses the notion of a mental lexicon within the context of its historical roots in generative linguistics and psycholinguistics. It examines two dominant metaphors in the literature: one in which the multilingual person is characterized as possessing interacting lexical stores and the other in which the multilingual person is characterized as possessing a network of interacting lexical items in a single multilingual lexical store. The chapter explores the special role that structurally‐complex words may play in the organization of words in the mind and how the specific nature of a multilingual's lexical system is shaped by the linguistic and morphological properties of the languages.
Do nonselected lexical nodes activate their phonological information? Catalan–Spanish bilinguals were asked to name (a) pictures whose names are cognates in the 2 languages (words that are phonologically similar in the 2 languages) and (b) pictures whose names are noncognates in the 2 languages. If nonselected lexical nodes are phonologically encoded, naming latencies should be shorter for cognate words, and because the cognate status of words is only meaningful for bilingual speakers, this difference should disappear when testing monolingual speakers. The results of Experiment 1 fully supported these predictions. In Experiment 2, the difference between cognate and noncognate words was larger when naming in the nondominant language than when naming in the dominant language. The results of the 2 experiments are interpreted as providing support to cascaded activation models of lexical access.
In the recent swell of research on bilingualism and its consequences for the mind and the brain, there has been a warning that we need to remember that not all bilinguals are the same (e.g., Green & Abutalebi, 2013; Kroll & Bialystok, 2013; Luk & Bialystok, 2013). There are bilinguals who acquired two languages in early childhood and have used them continuously throughout their lives, bilinguals who acquired one language early and then switched to another language when they entered school or emigrated from one country to another, and others who only acquired a second language (L2) as an adult. Among these forms of bilingualism there are differences in both the context and amount of time spent in each language and differences in the status of the languages themselves. The L2 may be a majority language, spoken by almost everyone in the environment, or a minority language, spoken only by a few. The native or first language (L1) may also be the dominant language or may have been overtaken by the influence of the L2 given the circumstances imposed by the environment. Likewise, the L1 and L2 may vary in how similar they are structurally, whether they share the same written script, or whether one language is spoken and the other signed.
Presents a standardized set of 260 pictures for use in experiments investigating differences and similarities in the processing of pictures and words. The pictures are black-and-white line drawings executed according to a set of rules that provide consistency of pictorial representation. They have been standardized on 4 variables of central relevance to memory and cognitive processing: name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. The intercorrelations among the 4 measures were low, suggesting that they are indices of different attributes of the pictures. The concepts were selected to provide exemplars from several widely studied semantic categories. Sources of naming variance, and mean familiarity and complexity of the exemplars, differed significantly across the set of categories investigated. The potential significance of each of the normative variables to a number of semantic and episodic memory tasks is discussed. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).
Using code-switching as a tool to illustrate how language experience modulates comprehension, the visual world paradigm was employed to examine the extent to which gender-marked Spanish determiners facilitate upcoming target nouns in a group of Spanish-English bilingual code-switchers. The first experiment tested target Spanish nouns embedded in a carrier phrase (Experiment 1b) and included a control Spanish monolingual group (Experiment 1a). The second set of experiments included critical trials in which participants heard code-switches from Spanish determiners into English nouns (e.g., la house) either in a fixed carrier phrase (Experiment 2a) or in variable and complex sentences (Experiment 2b). Across the experiments, bilinguals revealed an asymmetric gender effect in processing, showing facilitation only for feminine target items. These results reflect the asymmetric use of gender in the production of code-switched speech. The extension of the asymmetric effect into Spanish (Experiment 1b) underscores the permeability between language modes in bilingual code-switchers.
