Language-specific cognitive flexibility is related to code-switching habits and interactional context; domain-general cognitive flexibility is not

ABSTRACT

Individualistic experience with code-switching has often been found to modulate bilingual executive functioning, though the direction of these effects is variable. The present study investigated whether French-English code-switching in a primarily dual-language context (the environment which requires the most control processes) may lead to increased cognitive flexibility. Sustained (mixing) and transient (switching) cognitive flexibility was examined in a domain-general task and a novel language-specific task (i.e. a cued bilingual lexical decision task). First, mixing and switching effects in the domain-general task were not reliably predicted by the participants’ code-switching habits. Second, though the sample displayed minimal switching effects and a mixing benefit in the language-specific task, these were positively predicted by the participants’ deliberate code-switching. By contrast, predictors related to dense code-switching were negatively related to the participants’ language-specific sustained cognitive flexibility. Altogether, our findings indicate that any training instilled by dual-language code-switching is restricted to language-specific cognitive flexibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Dual-language
• executive functioning
• bilingualism
• mixing
• proactive control

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

LG and LS conceptualised and designed the study. LG collected the data, conducted the analyses, and wrote the manuscript. LS supervised these tasks. Both authors revised and approved the final version of the manuscript.

Data availability statement

The full study design (including consent form, questionnaires, and tasks) is available for preview and cloning at https://app.gorilla.sc/openmaterials/429412. The materials, R scripts, and anonymized data (by-trial and aggregated) are available on OSF at https://osf.io/qdsv4/?view_only=a2566d611fb44cdb89ab895591a338e5.

Author’s note

Preliminary results obtained by analyzing initial subsets of the data were also presented at the XV International Symposium of Psycholinguistics (June 2021) and the 31st Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science meeting (June 2021). This study was not pre-registered.

Notes

1 Ten participants included in the final sample did not report their age and were thus attributed the mean age of the sample (21.2 years).

2 The “Colour” and “Shape” blocks are collapsed into the single averaged condition, “single-cue block”.

3 Dominance scores were computed according to the procedure in Gosselin and Sabourin (2023) (i.e., by examining age of exposure, proficiency, current usage and self-reported first language). These scores range from −4 (very English-dominant) to +4 (very French-dominant).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ontario Graduate Scholarship; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [grant number Joseph-Armand Bombardier Scholarship].