2007/08/29

Costa, A., Santesteban, M. & Ivanova, I. (2006). How do highly proficient bilinguals control their lexicalization process? Inhibitory and language-specific selection mechanisms are both functional. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32(5),1057-1074.

Presentation: Chris
Summary: Shelly

Previous studies have established that for highly proficient bilinguals, their lexical selection system is more like the Language-specific Model, rather than the Inhibitory Control Model. Basing on this notion, the present study aims to further check the impact of the similarity of bilinguals’ L1 and L2, as well as their age of L2 acquisition. Four experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 tested the impact of language similarity (Spanish vs. Basque (not similar)) and age of acquisition (Spanish (early) vs. English (late)) by asking the highly proficient subjects to do the picture naming task (with language switching trials). The results showed that, for both conditions, the switching costs are similar for both languages, implying that the Language-specific Model is at work. Experiment 2 examined the bilinguals’ performance involving L2 (dominant language) and L3 (weaker language), and the results showed that the working mechanism is still Language-specific Model. Concluding from experiment 1 and 2, one would hypothesize that a highly proficient bilingual would stick to the Language-specific Model regardless of the similarity and the age of acquisition of the involving languages. In order to test this hypothesis, Experiments 3 and 4 were conducted by involving (a) L3 and L4 and (b) L1 and a newly learned language. In the results of the two experiments, the asymmetrical switching cost was found, suggesting that the Inhibitory Control Model is at work when the involved languages are weak, even though the speaker is a highly proficient bilingual. To sum up, this study found that in some conditions highly proficient bilinguals resort to the Language-specific Mechanism (when the dominant language involved) and in others (when the involved language is weak or not-well-established) they do not.