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16:30 - 18:00
Parallel sessions 6
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16:30 - 18:00
Room: HSZ - 7E02
Chair/s:
Tanja C Roembke, Matilde Ellen Simonetti
Bilinguals require language control to regulate the activation of their known languages. Language switching paradigms are commonly used to investigate the processes underlying bilingual language control. Several approaches fall under the umbrella term “language switching,” whose defining feature is the alternation between languages, thereby requiring bilinguals to select one language over another on each trial. In this symposium, five talks present innovative research using language switching to explore language control processes in both comprehension (Talks 1-2) and production (Talks 3-4). Across studies, different paradigms (e.g., picture naming, voluntary switching, sequential switching) and methodologies, from behavioral measures to virtual reality, are employed. The focus extends beyond single-word processing to include also sentence-level processing. In Talk 1, Aaron Vandendaele examines proactive control mechanisms during language switching using a semantic classification task involving written word categorization. Luigi Falanga (Talk 2) investigates the flexibility of control and the role of interference in language-switching comprehension tasks. His study explores how recent and ongoing cross-language interference influences comprehension in complex listening contexts. In Talk 3, Andrea Philipp discusses how between-language conflict at the lemma-level shapes language control during switching. She examines the impact of cross-language interference on lexical selection and how conflict resolution processes facilitate language switching. Finally, in Talk 4, Maria Sanchez investigates sentence production in interactions with virtual interlocutors. Her study uses both voluntary and cued language-switching paradigms to examine how speakers adapt their language choice based on the interlocutor’s accent and linguistic background. Together, these talks showcase new directions in the study of bilingual language control, illustrating how innovative paradigms and technologies are reshaping our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying language switching.
Submission 538
Adaptive Language Control in Bilingual Speech Comprehension: The Influence of Cross-Language Interference
SymposiumTalk-02
Presented by: Luigi Falanga
Luigi Falanga, Parastou K. Ahrabi, Denise N. Stephan, Andrea M. Philipp, Iring Koch
Institute of Psychology, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Comprehending speech in bilingual auditory environments requires attentional and language control processes to select the relevant language-specific information while resisting cross-language interference from competing linguistic input. The present study examined how recent and current cross-language interference influences bilingual speech comprehension. Thirty German-English bilinguals completed a language-cued selective listening task in which, in each trial, two spoken words were presented simultaneously, one in each language. Guided by visual cues, participants categorized the magnitude of the number word spoken in the target language as smaller or greater than five while ignoring the distractor in the non-cued language. Results showed worse performance when selectively listening to words in the second language. Additionally, language switch costs were observed when participants switched the target language across trials. These language switch costs were larger under higher levels of target-distractor cross-language interference, that is, when the magnitude category of the target word was incongruent with that of the distractor word. Incongruent trials also produced worse overall performance relative to congruent trials (i.e., congruency effect), indicating the processing of distractor information. Following incongruent trials, the congruency effect was reduced compared to post-congruent trials, showing a congruency sequence effect (CSE), but only when the target language repeated, reflecting adaptations of attentional control. However, following incongruent trials, language switch costs were greater, pointing to persisting effects of prior cross-language interference on language control. These findings indicate that attentional and language control processes flexibly adjust to changes in task demands, with performance costs modulated by both recent and current cross-language interference.