The time course of within and between-language interference in bilinguals

Abstract

Purpose: Recent research has provided support for linguistic coactivation, the view that the two languages of a bilingual are simultaneously active. Importantly, even if the system is fundamentally nonselective, the two languages of a bilingual can be activated to different degrees. The main contribution of the present paper is to empirically test what "different degrees of activation" really means. Differences could emerge in the timing or the magnitude of language activation. Methodology: Most of the research to date has been based on experiments using reaction times. In the present experiment participants responded to a bilingual Stroop task using a computer mouse. We argue that mouse tracking can provide new insights into the temporal dynamics of cognitive processes. Data and analysis: We used a series of t-tests to analyze participants' mouse trajectories (n = 20). We compared the x-coordinates over time for each of the four experimental conditions (Congruent-Within, Congruent-Between, Incongruent-Within, Incongruent-Between) with the x-coordinates over time for the control trajectory. Findings: Differences in the timing, but not the magnitude, of interference are at the root of the differential effects within and between languages. Within-language interference emerged 80 ms earlier than between-language interference. Originality: To our knowledge, the current experiment is the first to use the dynamic mouse-tracking paradigm to compare the time course of the two languages of a bilingual participant. Implications: The mouse-tracking paradigm can help to distinguish between the timing and the magnitude of interference, informing current theories of the bilingual mind.

A multi-lab study of bilingual infants: Exploring the preference for infant-directed speech

“…This ended up being unfeasible for some labs within the timeframe available (which was more than a year), in some cases due to a high number of participants not meeting our strict criterion for inclusion as bilingual. This undoubtedly highlights the challenges for labs in recruiting bilingual infant samples, and moreover raises questions about how bilingualism should be defined, and whether it should be treated as a continuous vs. categorical variable (Anderson, Mak, Chahi, & Bialystok, 2018;Bialystok, Luk, Peets, & Yang, 2018;Incera & McLennan, 2018). Second, we had planned to explore the effect of different language pairs on IDS preference.…”

An Error Analysis on Student’s Translation Text

“…This finding is similiar with the previos studies conducted by Brown et all. (2019), Incera & McLennan (2018), Fieder et all. (2019, Brooks & Kempe (2019) who consider that interference is one of factors which can affect negatively to the language acquisition in foreign language learning.…”

Measuring the Timing of the Bilingual Advantage

“…Mouse-tracking measures have been implemented with bilingual populations ( Bartolotti and Marian, 2012 ; Incera and McLennan, 2016 , 2018a , b ). In 2016, my co-author and I reported the results of a Stroop task in which English-Spanish bilinguals, English-Other bilinguals (a group that included a wide range of language backgrounds), and English monolinguals responded to Spanish and English color words ( Incera and McLennan, 2016 ).…”

“…Temporal differences are often easy to visualize in figures, but relatively difficult to pinpoint with our current statistical methods. For example, in a mouse-tracking study in which a group of Spanish-English bilinguals participated in a Stroop task with Spanish and English color words ( Incera and McLennan, 2018b ), my co-author and I reported that within-language interference (English words with English response alternatives) emerged 80 ms earlier than between-language interference (Spanish words with English response alternatives). It is obvious that if we had used 100 ms time-windows we would have missed this 80 ms time difference.…”