Dynamic adaptation of attentional control across bilingual interactional contexts

Bilingual experience is thought to shape cognitive control via adaptive attentional reorganization, yet the neural mechanisms by which different interactional contexts dynamically modulate attentional control remain unclear. This study used EEG to examine how Chinese monolingual, English monolingual, bilingual, and voluntary naming contexts influence attentional control in Chinese-English bilinguals.

Thirty-five bilinguals completed picture-naming tasks in different contexts, followed by an antisaccade task with concurrent EEG. We analyzed reaction time, ERPs, frontal and parietal delta/theta power, and frontoparietal functional connectivity (wPLI).

Bilingual and voluntary naming contexts shortened antisaccade reaction times (all p < 0.01). No significant main effect of context was found on N2 amplitudes (p = 0.615). Both contexts reduced parietal delta and theta power relative to the English monolingual context (all p < 0.05). Exploratory connectivity analysis initially suggested bilingual-context effects, but this finding did not survive homologous ROI validation. These preliminary sensor-level findings await validation by source-localized EEG or fMRI.

These findings suggest that bilingual and voluntary naming contexts may facilitate attentional control through adaptive reorganization of the attentional system rather than through enhancing a specific inhibitory process. This pattern is consistent with the adaptationist perspective on bilingual cognition and provides preliminary neural evidence for the language mode theory.