Direction matters: Event-related brain potentials reflect extra processing costs in switching from the dominant to the less dominant language

Identifying bilingual talkers after a language switch: Language experience matters

“…Our findings also suggest that specific types of language experience play a role in this process, including one's experience with language mixing in speech production. Interestingly, the construct that was associated with the increased ability to generalize indexical properties across languages was not one's overall language mixing habits, but rather one's frequency of switching to the second, non-dominant language -which is a task that requires more processing effort than the reverse (i.e., switching to the more-dominant language; Liao & Chan, 2016). It would then follow that bilinguals who have more experience producing language switches would also encode and process indexical properties from bilingual speech with more ease.…”

Code-Switching Does Not Equal Code-Switching. An Event-Related Potentials Study on Switching From L2 German to L1 Russian at Prepositions and Nouns

“…However, Proverbio et al (2004; on English-Italian and Italian-English CS with Italian professional simultaneous interpreters), Ruigendijk et al (2016; on German-Russian CS with Russian L1 speakers of German), Zeller et al (2016; on Belarusian-Russian CS), and Liao and Chan (2016; on Mandarin-Taiwanese CS with Mandarin-Taiwanese bilinguals) reported a typical N400. Proverbio et al (2004) found this N400 effect only for CS from L1 to L2, and Liao and Chan (2016) found it only for CS into the less dominant language but not vice versa. Moreno et al (2002); Liao and Chan (2016), and Ruigendijk et al (2016) also observed an LPC for processing CS.…”

“…Proverbio et al (2004) found this N400 effect only for CS from L1 to L2, and Liao and Chan (2016) found it only for CS into the less dominant language but not vice versa. Moreno et al (2002); Liao and Chan (2016), and Ruigendijk et al (2016) also observed an LPC for processing CS. This LPC varied with language proficiency: a higher proficiency led to lower LPC peaks (Moreno et al, 2002;Ruigendijk et al, 2016).…”

“…Among ERP studies on the CS of single elements, studies on the CS of nouns are prevalent. Some of these studies used visually presented stimuli in their experiments (Moreno et al, 2002;Proverbio et al, 2004), while others used auditorily presented stimuli (Liao and Chan, 2016;Ruigendijk et al, 2016;Zeller et al, 2016). The first ERP study on CS by Moreno et al (2002; on English-Spanish CS with English-Spanish bilinguals) found a negativity for CS that was larger over the left than the right hemisphere and stretched over lateral anterior sites in contrast to a typical, non-lateralized N400.…”

“…Kutas et al, 2009;Van Hell et al, 2015. Most of these studies have considered the processing of the CS of single nouns (among others, Moreno et al, 2002;Liao and Chan, 2016;Ruigendijk et al, 2016) or other meaningful lexical elements (on verbs, see Ng et al, 2014;on adjectives, see van der Meij et al, 2011) as one instantiation of CS. Most studies have found some type of early negativity (e.g., an N400, see below for details) and/or a late positive complex (LPC, see below for details) for processing CS, which sometimes depend on the direction of the switch, such as from the first language (L1) into the second (L2), or vice versa, or on the proficiency of the L2.…”