Parallel language activation and inhibitory control in bimodal bilinguals.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psycholinguistics
• Bilingualism Research

Background:

• Spoken-language bilinguals utilize nonlinguistic inhibitory control to manage cross-linguistic competition during auditory word recognition.
• This advantage may arise from resolving perceptual competition between similar-sounding words within and across languages.
• If competition is absent, these advantages should diminish.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate inhibitory control during bilingual language comprehension.
• To examine the link between language co-activation and nonlinguistic inhibitory control in bimodal bilinguals.
• To determine if inhibitory control is engaged when languages do not perceptually compete.

Main Methods:

• Utilized the visual world paradigm to identify cross-linguistic distractor activation.
• Assessed nonlinguistic inhibitory control using a spatial Stroop task.
• Correlated Stroop task performance with language co-activation in 27 hearing ASL-English bilinguals.

Main Results:

• A significant correlation was found between cross-linguistic distractor activation and spatial Stroop task performance.
• Smaller Stroop effects, indicating more efficient inhibition, were linked to reduced ASL sign co-activation.
• This occurred during the early stages of auditory word recognition.

Conclusions:

• Inhibitory control in auditory word recognition extends beyond resolving phonological competition.
• It also moderates competition arising from the lexico-semantic level.
• Findings suggest a broader role for inhibitory control in bilingual language processing.