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Diffusing the bilingual lexicon: Task-based and lexical components of language switch costs
Gabriel Ong1, Meredith McKague1, Brendan Weekes2
1University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Abstract:
Bilingual speakers show a response time (RT) cost when switching between languages. These costs could reflect the organization of language in a shared bilingual lexicon (Grainger, Midgley, & Holcomb, 2010) or a domain general cognitive processing cost (Green & Abutalebi, 2013). To test these accounts, we analysed RT distributions of bilingual (Spanish-English) performance on generalized lexical decision (GLD) tasks using Ratcliff (1978) diffusion model. Experiment 1 revealed that language switches decrease the rate of evidence accumulation (drift rate) and slow the cognitive processes that occur prior to decision-making (non-decision time). Experiment 2 showed that the anticipation of language switches did not change these effects. The results suggest that language switch costs originate from a combination of at least two loci: lexical access and a task-specific decision process.
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