Bilingual Flanker Revelation: Unveiling Language Control

Description

Poster presentation

Bilingual comprehension is an immensely complex process in which both languages are activated simultaneously, leading to cross-language interference. The process that helps bilinguals navigate through this interference is called language control, and it does so by increasing their chances of selecting words in the target language (Declerck, 2019). While language control has been extensively researched in production literature, there is a noticeable gap in understanding
how this process works during comprehension. That is why our main goal is to investigate the presence and nature of language control during written bilingual comprehension. In the present study, we will test French natives with English as their second language. To this end, we will utilize the Bilingual Flanker Task with an extra condition – neutral condition (containing nonwords). Through this task we aim to gain insight about the underlying mechanism of language control, namely inhibition. While in production-based literature there are a few measures that account for this claim (i.e., asymmetrical switch costs, n-2 language repetition costs, reversed language dominance, and blocked language order effect), the same have not been as indicative in comprehension studies (for a recent review, see Declerck & Koch, 2023). Overall, this ongoing study will give us the opportunity to answer crucial questions about inhibition as the most probable
underlying mechanism of language control during bilingual comprehension.

Periode	8 jul 2024
Evenementstitel	Highlights in Language Sciences 2024
Evenementstype	!!Performance
Locatie	Nijmegen, Netherlands
Mate van erkenning	International