Adaptive language control between comprehension and production in bilinguals

This study investigates bilingual language control across comprehension and production. In three experiments, Chinese-English bilinguals alternated between tasks on every trial. In the comprehension task, participants judged the meaning of a written word (Experiment 1) or a spoken word (Experiments 2 and 3) in either language. In the production task, they named pictures in only one language (Experiments 1 and 2) or in either language (Experiment 3), with half of the trials involving language switching. Thus, salient visual language cues were available only in Experiment 1, and within-production language switching occurred only in Experiment 3. Language switch costs from comprehension to production emerged only in Experiment 2, where spoken word comprehension was paired with single-language production. These findings suggest that reduced saliency of language cues encourages a shared language control mechanism across comprehension and production when within-production control demands are low, supporting the adaptive nature of bilingual language control.