Bimodal language switching: New insights from signing and typing

The effects of input and output modalities on language switching between Chinese and English

“…This can be explained by shared lexical-semantic and phonological retrieval processes between speaking and handwriting. It is in line with the results by a previous study that more language inhibition was required in switching between speaking and typing, compared with speaking and signing (Schaeffner et al, 2017), as the phonological retrieval processes were more overlapping between speaking and typing, compared with speaking and signing.…”

“…The study by Schaeffner et al (2017) demonstrated that language inhibition in switching between speaking and typing was more costly than output channel inhibition in switching between speaking and signing. This was explained by the phonological overlap between speaking and typing: as typing and handwriting share similar retrieval mechanism of phonological information (Pinet, Ziegler & Alario, 2016;Schaeffner et al, 2017), but there is no phonological overlap between speaking and signing, for phonological information may not be required in signing. According to the phonological mediation hypothesis, writing consists of inner speech (e.g., Geschwind, 1969;Luria, 1970), and it demands the same phonological information as speaking (Schaeffner et al, 2017).…”

“…This was explained by the phonological overlap between speaking and typing: as typing and handwriting share similar retrieval mechanism of phonological information (Pinet, Ziegler & Alario, 2016;Schaeffner et al, 2017), but there is no phonological overlap between speaking and signing, for phonological information may not be required in signing. According to the phonological mediation hypothesis, writing consists of inner speech (e.g., Geschwind, 1969;Luria, 1970), and it demands the same phonological information as speaking (Schaeffner et al, 2017). This was supported by a previous study showing that inconsistent spelling will induce more writing errors, compared with consistent spelling (Bonin, Peereman & Fayol, 2001).…”

“…Despite the word-form encoding difference between speaking and writing, some previous studies have investigated language control in signing (Kaufmann et al, 2018; Schaeffner, Fibla & Philipp, 2017) and typing (Schaeffner et al, 2017), and they have shown that the shared phonological information between writing and speaking might play a main role in language control. By comparing unimodal (spoken-spoken) and bimodal (experiment 1: spoken-signed; experiment 2: spoken-typed) switching, Schaeffner et al (2017) found that switch costs were lower in bimodal switching than unimodal switching only when participants had to switch between speaking and signing, but not between speaking and typing. The output channels of speaking and signing or typing were the mouth and hands respectively.…”

“…During bimodal switching, although lemmas in both languages can remain uninhibited at the lexical level as people can produce both languages simultaneously, the irrelevant output channel may need to be inhibited to ensure that a correct output channel is being used. The study by Schaeffner et al (2017) demonstrated that language inhibition in switching between speaking and typing was more costly than output channel inhibition in switching between speaking and signing. This was explained by the phonological overlap between speaking and typing: as typing and handwriting share similar retrieval mechanism of phonological information (Pinet, Ziegler & Alario, 2016; Schaeffner et al, 2017), but there is no phonological overlap between speaking and signing, for phonological information may not be required in signing.…”