Should I stay or should I switch? A cost–benefit analysis of voluntary language switching in young and aging bilinguals.

Abstract

Bilinguals spontaneously switch languages in conversation even though laboratory studies reveal robust cued language switching costs. The authors investigated how voluntary-switching costs might differ when switches are voluntary. Younger (Experiments 1–2) and older (Experiment 3) Spanish–English bilinguals named pictures in 3 conditions: (a) dominant-language only, (b) nondominant-language only, and (c) using “whatever language comes to mind” (in Experiment 2, “using each language about half the time”). Most bilinguals, particularly balanced bilinguals, voluntarily mixed languages even though switching was costly. Unlike with cued switching, voluntary switching sometimes facilitated responses, switch costs were not greater for the dominant language, and age effects on language mixing and switching were limited. This suggests that the freedom to mix languages voluntarily allows unbalanced and older bilinguals to function more like balanced and younger bilinguals. Voluntary switch costs reveal an expanded role for inhibitory control in bilingual language production and imply a mandatory separation by language in bilingual lexical selection.

If you stay, it might be easier: Switch costs from comprehension to production in a joint switching task.

“…Interestingly, we replicated Gollan and Ferreira's (2009) and Gollan et al's (2014) results only partially. Based on their findings, we expected bilinguals who switch voluntarily to switch around 25% of the time and to exhibit a switching profile characterized by more stay than switch trials in L1, and more switch than stay trials in L2.…”

“…Although one should be careful to interpret this effect in the same way as local effects in solo language switching tasks (since the immediate local context was always a Dutch word produced by the NonSwitching participant), this finding resembles the lack of switch costs observed by Gollan and Ferreira (2009) in their Experiment 2. They (p. 652) offered a speculative account of this unusual result, which we think could apply to our findings as well.…”

“…Our switching participants switched more often in the Mixed block (50%) than those in Gollan and Ferreira (2009) who switched only 25% of the time. On average, they chose to name 42% of the pictures in English.…”

“…Additionally, bilinguals take longer to name pictures on stay trials within mixed blocks than in pure blocks (e.g., Hernandez & Kohnert, 1999). We will refer to this as a global switch cost (Gollan & Ferreira, 2009). …”

“…It must be noted that, unlike Gollan and Ferreira (2009) and Gollan et al (2014), we familiarized our participants with the pictures' L2 names, and we also stressed the importance of using L2 for "at least some" of the pictures. It is possible that these two aspects of our procedure made the selection of L2 names somewhat more likely despite the lack of explicit instructions to use L2 as often as L1.…”