Multiple Levels of Bilingual Language Control

Abstract

Bilinguals rarely produce words in an unintended language. However, we induced such intrusion errors (e.g., saying el instead of he) in 32 Spanish-English bilinguals who read aloud language-selective and language-mixed paragraphs with English or Spanish word order. Bilinguals produced language intrusions almost exclusively in language-mixed paragraphs, and most often when attempting to produce dominant-language targets (accent-only errors also exhibited reversed language dominance effects). Most intrusion errors occurred for function word targets, especially when they did not match paragraph language word order. Eye movements showed that fixating a word in the non-target language increased intrusion errors only for function word targets. Together, these results imply multiple mechanisms of language control, including (a) inhibition of the dominant language at both lexical (Green, 1998) and sublexical processing levels, (b) special retrieval mechanisms for function words in mixed-language utterances (Myers-Scotton, 1993), and (c) attention’s role in monitoring target language for match with intended language.

Bilingual language intrusions and other speech errors in Alzheimer’s disease

“…In previous work, most intrusion errors involved function word targets, whereas most within-language errors involved content word targets (Gollan et al, 2014; Gollan & Goldrick, 2016, in press; these same part of speech effects on intrusion errors have also been found in bilinguals’ spontaneous speech, see Poulisse, 1999; Poulisse & Bongaerts, 1994). Indeed, young and cognitively healthy older bilinguals very rarely produced intrusion errors with language switches on content-word targets.…”

“…Different predictions however, would follow for intrusion errors, which produced significantly reversed-dominance effects in previous studies such that bilinguals replaced dominant-language targets with non-dominant-language translations more often than the reverse (i.e., more often than they replaced non-dominant-language targets with dominant-language translations; Gollan et al, 2014; Gollan & Goldrick, 2016, in press). For example, an English-dominant bilingual would be more likely to replace the English word reason with its Spanish equivalent, razón , when reading aloud a sentence written mostly in Spanish (e.g., Es por esa reason que digo que la leyenda de La Llorona es verdad ) than he would be to replace the Spanish razón with reason , when reading the English equivalent sentence (i.e., It is because of that razón that I say that the legend of the Weeping Woman is true ).…”

“…Following the methods of Gollan et al (2014) and Gollan and Goldrick (2016, in press), native Spanish-English bilingual research assistants transcribed errors and classified them into error types. A small number of speech productions could have been classified as more than one type of error or as possibly correct.…”

“…In recent work we used a paragraph reading task (Kolers, 1966) to demonstrate that reading aloud elicits connected speech in a manner that engages the language production system and leads speakers to produce speech errors that resemble errors produced in spontaneous conversation (Gollan, Schotter, Gomez, Murillo, & Rayner, 2014; Gollan & Goldrick, 2016, in press). For example, bilinguals produced significantly more errors when reading aloud in their non-dominant language than when reading in their dominant language (e.g., producing kept instead of keep , or turn instead of turning ).…”

What’s easier: Doing what you want, or being told what to do? Cued versus voluntary language and task switching.

“…At best, switching appears to sometimes be a cost-free option that bilinguals can employ. However, important differences remain between naturally occurring switches and the switches studied here, most obviously the absence of connected speech and grammatical encoding (Bullock & Toribio, 2009; Dussias, 2003; Gollan, Schotter, Gomez, Murillo, & Rayner, 2014), and the absence of naturalistic cues to switching (e.g., Li, Yang, Scherf, & Li, 2013; Zhang, Morris, Cheng, & Yap, 2013). Nevertheless, some additional insights about what motivates switches can be gained from the observation that repetition reduced the rate of voluntary choices to switch (when considering both included and excluded participants).…”