A new look at “the hard problem” of bilingual lexical access: evidence for language-switch costs with univalent stimuli

ABSTRACT

Considerable work has used language-switching tasks to investigate how bilinguals manage competition between languages. Language-switching costs have been argued to reflect persisting inhibition or persisting activation of a non-target language. However, these costs might instead reflect the use of bivalent stimuli (i.e. pictures or digits that can be responded to in either language). That is, language-switching costs may simply reflect a cost of selecting the task-appropriate response for a given item and so may not be reflective of bilingual lexical access [Finkbeiner, M., Almeida, J., Janssen, N., & Carramaza, A. (2006). Lexical selection in bilingual speech production does not involve language suppression. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32(5), 1075–1089]. The present study addresses this concern by having Chinese/English bilinguals switch between languages in response to inherently univalent stimuli (English words and Chinese Characters) as well as lexically univalent, but orthographically bivalent, stimuli (English words and Chinese Pinyin). Speakers showed switch costs when naming both univalent and orthographically bivalent stimuli, showing that switch costs can be found even with inherently univalent stimuli.

KEYWORDS:

• Language switching
• bilingualism
• language production

Acknowledgements

We thank Mathieu Declerck, Angela He, Daniel Kleinman, Alison Shell, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful advice and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

L. Robert Slevc http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5183-6786

Notes

¹The first experimental trial in each block was included as a stay trial as it occurred directly after (and in the same condition as) the final practice trial.

²Although this interaction was not significant, it was the case that the simple effect of switch condition within the Pinyin/English block was significant for English (estimate = 19.3, SE = 7.7, t = 2.50) and non-significant for Pinyin (estimate = 18.0, SE = 15.1, t = 1.20). Although this is not problematic for our primary conclusion that switch costs emerge even in the bivalent Character/English block, it is nevertheless somewhat surprising. The lack of an interaction effect in this block likely reflects, at least in part, the high variability in Pinyin naming times by items. That is, the by-item random variance was much larger for Pinyin than for English naming (SDs of 104 vs. 32, respectively); this, combined with small switch costs overall, likely makes it difficult to observe reliable switch cost asymmetries.

³We thank Dan Kleinman for this suggestion.

⁴Note that this interaction was not significant in a model with a maximal random effects structure (b = 12.38, t = 1.67); however, this more complex model does not appear to be justified as it had slightly higher AIC and BIC values than the simplified model reported here (for details, please see supplemental material at http://hdl.handle.net/1903/17152).

Additional information

Funding

This research reported in this manuscript served as partial fulfilment of Nicholas Davey's undergraduate honours thesis at the University of Maryland and was supported in part by a Language Science Summer Scholarship from the Center for Advanced Study of Language.