The influence of language control on second language acquisition

When multilinguals use one of their languages, all languages they know are activated in parallel in their mental lexicon, resulting in cross-language interference. The mechanism that mitigates this interference and ensures the successful target language selection is language control. In multilingualism research, language control has been recognized as a pivotal process for multilingual language use. In contrast, its role during second language acquisition (SLA) and thus during the onset of multilingualism remains unclear. This research gap comes as a surprise since the central role of language control for multilingual processing suggests that this mechanism should also be highly relevant for acquiring a second language (L2). To address this gap, the present project sets out to examine the influence of language control on SLA. For a comprehensive insight into this link, we will take both monolingual language learners as well as already established multilinguals into account and accompany them during the first stages of acquiring a new language. Moreover, as previous research suggests that there might be differences in the way learners acquire items and rules of an
L2, our project will consider both learning types by testing vocabulary and morphological learning. Taken together, this project will be the first to examine whether and how language control affects L2 acquisition, thus opening new research avenues at the intersection of multilingualism and SLA research.