The other modality: Auditory stimuli in language switching

Abstract

Language switching studies typically implement visual stimuli and visual language cues to trigger a concept and a language response, respectively. In the present study we set out to generalise this to another stimulus modality by investigating language switching with auditory stimuli next to visual stimuli. The results showed that switch costs can be obtained with both auditory and visual stimuli. Yet, switch costs were relatively larger with visual stimuli than with auditory stimuli. Both methodological and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Keywords:

• Auditory stimuli
• Language switching
• Stimulus modality
• Visual stimuli

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Self-rated scores of second language proficiency have been proven to be a good indication of L2 proficiency (e.g., Leblanc & Painchaud, 1985).

² The slower and more erroneous German responses than English responses are somewhat surprising, since L1 performance is typically better than L2 performance. Yet, several studies have found such an effect in mixed language blocks, which has been attributed to global L1 inhibition or independent changes of selection criteria of both languages (e.g., Costa & Santesteban, 2004).

³ Although typically a reversed pattern is observed in switch costs across languages, numerically larger L2 than L1 switch costs have been observed in other language switching studies (e.g., Declerck et al., 2012). Interesting to note is that, similar to those studies, we also observed overall worse L1 than L2 performance. Consequently, it might be that this reversal in overall language activation, demonstrated by the overall worse L1 than L2 performance, might have also reversed the switch cost pattern across languages in our study (cf. Green, 1998).