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

Bilingual models diverge in whether they assume that language control is domain general. Most studies that investigated this claim focused on bilingual language production and relied on the comparison between language switching and task switching. In the current study, we set out to investigate whether language control is domain general in a different context (i.e., bilingual language comprehension) and with a different paradigm (i.e., the flanker task). To this end, we let French-English bilinguals perform a bilingual (flankers are words from the same or different language as the target word) and a non-linguistic (numerical magnitude with digits) flanker task. The results showed that there was no difference in the language congruency effect between participants with a high and low non-linguistic congruency effect. These results indicate that there is no substantial overlap in the mechanisms involved in comprehension-based language control and executive control.