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The present study examined how a short period of language switching training affects nonverbal cognitive control, as measured by the AX version of the Continuous Performance Test. A group of Chinese-English bilinguals were trained over 10 days on a picture naming task that required switching between languages. We recorded their behavioral performance and event-related potentials before and after the training to examine its effects on cognitive performance. The behavioral measurement of proactive control, that is, goal maintenance before the occurrence of the target, is significantly larger in the post-training phase as compared with the pretraining phase, indicating a proactive control shift. The event-related potential results show that the training led to an increase in the mean amplitude of the N2 component, elicited by both the cue and the probe stimuli. A group of control participants who did not undergo training showed an enlarged N2 only for the probe but not for the cue stimuli in the second as compared with the first phase of testing. No variations in behavioral performance were found in the control group between the two phases of testing. These findings suggest that language switching training enhances proactive control in bilinguals.

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The present study examined the plasticity of the lexical selection mechanism in bilingual word production by training a group of unbalanced Chinese–English bilinguals with a language switching task. The experimental group received an 8-day language switching training, while the control group received no training. Before and after training, the behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) data of both groups in a cued picture naming task were collected. ERP results revealed a training effect such that after training, the N2 peak latency in cue-locked ERPs was shortened only in the experimental group. These results suggest that short-term language switching experience could improve the efficiency to establish the target language task schema, and that the language control mechanism of word production in unbalanced bilinguals could be modulated by language switching experience.

This study examined the effect of short-term language-switching training on the cognitive control mechanism in bilingual word production. In two experiments, two groups of relatively proficient but unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals performed a cued picture-naming task, in which they switched between their two languages. On two consecutive days, the participants took part in four sessions. The same procedure was employed on 2 days in Experiment 1, whereas the cue-language mapping was reversed on Day 2 in Experiment 2. In both experiments, picture naming in the dominant language (L1, Chinese) was slower than that in the weaker second language (L2, English) in all sessions. In addition, the reversed language dominance effect was enhanced with training, suggesting that training proactively increases the amount of inhibition of the dominant L1 at the global level. Furthermore, switching costs in the L1 were reduced with training in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2. These results indicate that language-switching training improves the efficiency of reactively exerting inhibitory control over the dominant L1 at the local level. However, when a cue matches with different target languages, the effect of training is absent at the local level. These findings reveal the plasticity and complexity of the cognitive control mechanism as a function of bilingual experience, particularly in language switching.