HL2C-SLLAT Seminar: Yun-Wei Lee (Lancaster)

Title: The variability of bilingual language control in L1/L2 language context

Presenter(s): Yun-Wei Lee (Lancaster)

Date: Wednesday 22 February 2023, 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location: This session will run in hybrid mode. We meet in COS - County South C89 and will stream via Microsoft Teams.

How to join: The seminars are free to attend. Simply sign up to the HL2C Mailing List or to the SLLAT mailing list to receive the link to join us via Microsoft Teams link. You do not need a Teams account to access the talk.

About: This is a joint event, co-organized by the Heritage Language 2 Consortium (HL2C) and the Second Language Learning and Teaching (SLLAT) Research Group.

Abstract:

Bilingual speakers can process two languages concurrently. In the field of language switching, a largely assessed language control mechanism is inhibitory control model or ICM (Green, 1998). The existence of inhibition leads to consequences such as switch cost, and the pattern of switch cost could be either symmetrical or asymmetrical (Meuter & Allport, 1999). The current study focuses on Mandarin-English language switching in three different contexts (i.e., L1-predominant, L2-predominant, mixed-language). Theoretically, L1 should receive more inhibition than L2 during language switching, namely L1 switch costs should be larger than L2 switch costs (i.e., asymmetrical switch cost). However, the results demonstrate that such pattern of switch costs can only be found in L1-predominant and mixed-language contexts, not in L2-predominant context. With respect to the theory of ICM, we discuss how L2 affects language switching and bilingual language control operates in different language contexts.

References

Green, D. W. (1998). Mental control of the bilingual lexico-semantic system. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1(2), 67-81.

Meuter, R. F., & Allport, A. (1999). Bilingual language switching in naming: Asymmetrical costs of language selection. Journal of Memory and Language, 40(1), 25-40.