Cognitive Processes in Bilinguals

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The goal of the proposed research is to use the bilingual as a vehicle to illuminate basic cognitive processes that serve as the interface between memory and language. Because bilinguals typically have at least two words available for any given concept, one in each of their languages, the process by which they select the appropriate word to speak provides a useful tool for investigating language production and competition across cognitive systems. Recent research on the way in which bilinguals understand and produce words in their two languages suggests that both languages are always active to some degree. How then do bilinguals manage to speak words in the intended language most of the time? The specific focus of the planned research is to examine the factors that modulate the competition that occurs when the bilingual's two languages are active. The experiments have two aims. One is to identify the conditions that give rise to cross-language competition. Each of the proposed experiments involves spoken language production in the first language (L1), the second language (L2), or under mixed conditions in which the two languages are directly competing with one another. A second aim of the proposed experiments is to identify the factors that modulate the activity of each language. These factors are hypothesized to include external cues that serve to signal one of the bilingual's two languages as well as internal attentional strategies that function to control the consequences of activation from the unintended language. The results of this work will have specific implications for models of bilingual language processing but will also provide important constraints for understanding the way in which skilled performance is controlled.