Conflict monitoring in bilingual language comprehension? Evidence from a bilingual flanker task

A different perspective on domain-general language control using the flanker task

“…However, this study did show a correlation between the cost related to switching to an incongruent trial and language-switch costs. Since switching between congruent and incongruent trials is related to conflict monitoring (e.g., Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, & Cohen, 2001), this might point to some similarity in how comprehension-based language control and executive control detect interference and in turn initiate interference resolution (for evidence against this claim, see Eben & Declerck, 2019).…”

“…This central word was flanked on either side by another completely unrelated word that could either be in the same language as the central target word or in the other language. Two prior studies have shown that performance is worse when the central and flanker words are in a different language (Declerck et al, 2018; Eben & Declerck, 2019). Similar to prior flanker studies (e.g., Rey-Mermet & Gade, 2018; Salthouse, 2010), this effect was interpreted as evidence for inhibitory control instigated by the language of the flanker word.…”

“…In the current study, we used the same setup as Eben and Declerck (2019) to further investigate the possibility of an overlap between comprehension-based language control and executive control. Unlike prior studies, where the focus was typically on language switching and some measure(s) of executive control, we compared performance in a bilingual flanker task (Declerck, Snell, & Grainger, 2018; Eben & Declerck, 2019) and a non-linguistic flanker task (e.g., Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974). More specifically, in the bilingual flanker task, bilingual participants had to categorize a centrally presented word as belonging to one language or the other (i.e., a language decision task).…”

“…2We used the data of the 32 participants of Eben and Declerck (2019), which was supplemented with an additional 18 participants to assure that both groups would have an adequate number of participants.…”

Conflict adaptation during multilingual language production as evidenced by the n-3 effect

“…To the best of our knowledge, no study has directly investigated the possibility of conflict adaptation during multilingual language production (for a recent study examining conflict adaptation during multilingual language comprehension, see Eben & Declerck, 2019). Yet, some models of multilingual language production have proposed that language control, a process assumed to reduce cross-language interference during multilingual language processing (for a review, see Declerck & Philipp, 2015), is initiated by conflict monitoring (Abutalebi & Green, 2007; Green & Abutalebi, 2013).…”