Inhibition accumulates over time at multiple processing levels in bilingual language control

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that bilinguals enable production in their nondominant language by inhibiting their dominant language temporarily, fully lifting inhibition to switch back. In a re-analysis of data from 416 Spanish-English bilinguals who repeatedly named a small set of pictures while switching languages in response to cues, we separated trials into different types that revealed three cumulative effects. Bilinguals named each picture (a) faster for every time they had previously named that same picture in the same language, an asymmetric repetition priming effect that was greater in their nondominant language, and (b) more slowly for every time they had previously named that same picture in the other language, an effect that was equivalent across languages and implies symmetric lateral inhibition between translation equivalents. Additionally, (c) bilinguals named pictures in the dominant language more slowly for every time they had previously named unrelated pictures in the nondominant language, exhibiting asymmetric language-wide global inhibition. These mechanisms dynamically alter the balances of activation between languages and between lemmas, providing evidence for an oft-assumed but seldom demonstrated key mechanism of bilingual control (competition between translations), resolving the mystery of why reversed language dominance sometimes emerges (the combined forces of asymmetrical effects emerge over time in mixed-language blocks), and also explaining other longer-lasting effects (block order). Key signatures of bilingual control can depend on seemingly trivial methodological details (e.g., the number of trials in a block) because inhibition is applied cumulatively at both local and global levels, persisting long after each individual act of selection.

What about proactive language control?

“…With a large group of Spanish-English bilinguals (cf. Kleinman & Gollan, 2016), Kleinman and Gollan (2018) recently showed that the occurrence of the reversed language dominance effect might be due to the number of trials. In their study, they found that the language dominance pattern reversed more as participants performed more trials, which indicates that it takes time to observe a reversed language dominance effect in a mixed language block.…”

The effect of second-language vocabulary on word retrieval in the native language

“…One criticism of the picture-word paradigm is that explicitly presenting distractor words makes lexical selection unlike what would occur normally (Finkbeiner et al, 2006; Spalek, Damian & Bölte, 2013). For example, the target word may receive an activation boost from the distractor because both the picture and the word activate the same semantic representation (Kleinman & Gollan, 2018). Translation distractors may also contribute to picture recognition speed (Hermans, 2000, 2004).…”

Switching between reading tasks leads to phase-transitions in reading times in L1 and L2 readers

“…For instance, as experimenters have tested task switching not just across block but also within block, they need to distinguish between global and local costs of switching, respectively [82] or, by another-yet-synonymous set of labels, switching costs and mixing costs, respectively [83]. Local/mixing costs may reflect that trial-by-trial variation in the task set never permits full reconfiguring the task set, and more global/switching costs may come from maintaining multiple tasks sets [82], but the costs of having to inhibit interfering task-stimulus relationships seem to accrue across time, no matter their source [84].…”