A Blessing in Disguise: Flanking Words Can Cancel Language Switch Costs

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Bilingualism Research

Background:

• Sentence context processing is hypothesized to reduce language control demands compared to single word processing.
• Existing evidence, primarily from bilingual language production, suggests reduced or absent language switch costs in sentence contexts, but findings are complex.
• The comprehension modality offers a distinct avenue to explore language control mechanisms.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the effect of sentence-like processing on language control during comprehension.
• To determine if language switch costs are modulated by contextual information in a comprehension task.
• To compare language control in single word versus sentence-contextualized processing.

Main Methods:

• Employed the lexical flanker task, known to induce sentence-like processing, with Dutch-English bilinguals (n=68).
• Participants performed a classification task in mixed-language blocks.
• Target words were presented either in isolation (no-flanker condition) or flanked by unrelated words in the same language.

Main Results:

• No significant language 1 (L1) switch costs were observed across conditions.
• Language 2 (L2) switch costs were only detected in the no-flanker condition.
• The presence of flankers (sentence-like context) reduced or eliminated L2 switch costs.

Conclusions:

• Language control processes benefit from sentence(-like) contextual information compared to single word processing.
• Contextual processing, as simulated by the flanker task, can effectively reduce or abolish language switch costs in bilingual comprehension.
• Findings support the hypothesis that integrated linguistic contexts facilitate more efficient language control.