Adaptation of control processes in code-switching

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

Bilingual individuals, broadly defined as anyone who can communicate in more than one language, encounter a myriad of linguistic choices, often guided by the linguistic needs of their conversation partners and the environmental setting such as being in a commercial setting, school, or work. They confront even more complex choices when conversing with other bilinguals. While bilinguals may choose to stay in one language, they may also code-switch between languages within a conversation. This immense variability in bilingual language use potentially relies upon general cognitive control mechanisms which over time may result in more efficient processing, a hypothesis known as the bilingual advantage. Prior research has had mixed results in confirming or disconfirming this hypothesis, in part due to reliance upon between-groups experimental designs and correlational analyses. This project builds on prior work by examining what aspects of bilingual language use may engage cognitive control within the same bilingual individuals and across the comprehension and production modalities. This project utilizes an experimental paradigm known as conflict adaptation across four experiments. The experiments intersperse two different tasks, one linguistic and the other not, under the assumption that engaging with cognitive control to resolve conflict on one task will lead to more efficient use of cognitive control on a subsequent task (the conflict adaptation effect). The four experiments test whether different forms of code-switching that vary in their degree of complexity will lead to differences in behavioral (Experiments 1, 2, 4) and neural (Experiment 3) performance on a subsequent non-linguistic task. Experiment 4 further tests the relationship between production and comprehension. Results from this project will help refine recent models of language control and lead to a better understanding of the link between bilingualism and cognitive control, underscoring the dynamic and adaptive nature of human sentence processing. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.