Adaptation of control processes in code-switching

通晓两种语言的人，广义上是指能够用一种以上的语言进行交流的人，他们会遇到无数的语言选择，这通常是由他们的对话伙伴的语言需求和环境环境所引导的，比如在商业环境、学校或工作环境中。当他们与其他双语者交谈时，他们面临更复杂的选择。虽然双语者可能会选择使用一种语言，但他们也可能在对话中在语言之间进行代码转换。双语语言使用的这种巨大可变性潜在地依赖于一般的认知控制机制，随着时间的推移，这种机制可能会导致更有效的处理，这一假设被称为双语优势。先前的研究在证实或否定这一假设方面有不同的结果，部分原因是依赖于组间实验设计和相关分析。本项目建立在先前工作的基础上，通过研究双语语言使用的哪些方面可能在同一双语个体中以及在理解和生产模式中参与认知控制。这个项目在四个实验中使用了一个被称为冲突适应的实验范式。实验将两个不同的任务（一个是语言任务，另一个不是语言任务）穿插在一起，假设在一个任务中使用认知控制来解决冲突会导致在后续任务中更有效地使用认知控制（冲突适应效应）。这四个实验测试了复杂程度不同的不同形式的语码转换是否会导致在随后的非语言任务中的行为（实验1、2、4）和神经（实验3）表现的差异。实验4进一步检验了产生和理解之间的关系。这个项目的结果将有助于完善最近的语言控制模型，更好地理解双语和认知控制之间的联系，强调人类句子处理的动态和适应性。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Bilingual individuals, broadly defined as anyone who can communicate in more than one language, encounter a myriad of linguistic choices, often guided by the linguistic needs of their conversation partners and the environmental setting such as being in a commercial setting, school, or work. They confront even more complex choices when conversing with other bilinguals. While bilinguals may choose to stay in one language, they may also code-switch between languages within a conversation. This immense variability in bilingual language use potentially relies upon general cognitive control mechanisms which over time may result in more efficient processing, a hypothesis known as the bilingual advantage. Prior research has had mixed results in confirming or disconfirming this hypothesis, in part due to reliance upon between-groups experimental designs and correlational analyses. This project builds on prior work by examining what aspects of bilingual language use may engage cognitive control within the same bilingual individuals and across the comprehension and production modalities.This project utilizes an experimental paradigm known as conflict adaptation across four experiments. The experiments intersperse two different tasks, one linguistic and the other not, under the assumption that engaging with cognitive control to resolve conflict on one task will lead to more efficient use of cognitive control on a subsequent task (the conflict adaptation effect). The four experiments test whether different forms of code-switching that vary in their degree of complexity will lead to differences in behavioral (Experiments 1, 2, 4) and neural (Experiment 3) performance on a subsequent non-linguistic task. Experiment 4 further tests the relationship between production and comprehension. Results from this project will help refine recent models of language control and lead to a better understanding of the link between bilingualism and cognitive control, underscoring the dynamic and adaptive nature of human sentence processing.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.