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Abstract■ Language switching in bilingual speakers requires attentional control to select the appropriate language, for example, in picture naming. Previous language-switch studies used the color of pictures to indicate the required language thereby confounding endogenous and exogenous control. To investigate endogenous language control, our language cues preceded picture stimuli by 750 msec. Cue-locked event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured while Dutch-English bilingual speakers overtly named pictures. The response language on consecutive trials could be the same (repeat trials) or different (switch trials). Naming latencies were longer on switch than on repeat trials, independent of the response language. Cue-locked ERPs showed an early posterior negativity for switch compared to repeat trials for L2 but not for L1, and a late anterior negativity for switch compared to repeat trials for both languages. The early switch-repeat effect might reflect disengaging from the nontarget native language, whereas the late switch-repeat effect reflects engaging in the target language. Implications for models of bilingual word production are discussed. ■

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(Costa, Caramazza and Sebastián-Gallés, 2000) and the between-language phonological facilitation effect of spoken distractor words in object naming (Hermans, Bongaerts, de Bot and Schreuder, 1998).People are generally good but not perfect at dealing with distraction. "I can resist everything except temptation", a character in an Oscar Wilde play once said. When talking in a foreign language, bilingual speakers have to resist the temptation of their mother tongue. The temptation to use the native language should be strong especially for bilingually unbalanced speakers, who are more proficient in the native than in a foreign language. This difference in proficiency presumably holds for selecting the appropriate words as well as for encoding their forms. The present article deals with the ability of bilingual speakers to encode the phonological forms of words in one language rather than another.Encoding the phonological forms of words in one language would be unproblematic if the phonological representations of the two languages were completely separate and if phonological representations were selectively activated in the target language only. In this article, we review evidence that the activation of phonological representations is not restricted to the target language and that the phonological representations of the languages of a bilingual individual are not separate. The evidence for language-nonspecific phonological activation includes the cognate facilitation effect, which is the finding that object naming is facilitated when the object names in the two languages have similar phonological forms, like Spanish gato and Catalan gat for "cat" (Costa, * We thank Albert Costa and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.