Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2013 Nov;39(6):1781-92. doi: 10.1037/a0032859. Epub 2013 May 6.
The current study investigated the scope of bilingual language control differentiating between whole-language control involving control of an entire lexicon specific to 1 language and lexical-level control involving only a restricted set of recently activated lexical representations. To this end, we tested 60 Dutch-English (Experiment 1) and 64 Chinese-English bilinguals (Experiment 2) on a verbal fluency task in which speakers produced members of letter (or phoneme for Chinese) categories first in 1 language and then members of either (a) the same categories or (b) different categories in their other language. Chinese-English bilinguals also named pictures in both languages. Both bilingual groups showed reduced dominant language fluency after producing exemplars from the same categories in the nondominant language, whereas nondominant language production was not influenced by prior production of words from the same categories in the other language. Chinese-English, but not Dutch-English, bilinguals exhibited similar testing order effects for different letter/phoneme categories. In addition, Chinese-English bilinguals who exhibited significant testing order effects in the repeated categories condition of the fluency task exhibited no such effects when naming repeated pictures after a language switch. These results imply multiple levels of inhibitory control in bilingual language production. Testing order effects in the verbal fluency task pinpoint a lexical locus of bilingual control, and the finding of interference effects for some bilinguals even when different categories are tested across languages further implies a whole-language control process, although the ability to exert such global inhibition may only develop for some types of bilinguals.
当前的研究调查了双语语言控制的范围，区分了整体语言控制（涉及控制特定于 1 种语言的整个词汇）和词汇水平控制（仅涉及最近激活的词汇表示的有限集合）。为此，我们在言语流畅性任务中测试了 60 名荷兰-英语（实验 1）和 64 名汉-英双语者（实验 2），在该任务中，说话者首先用 1 种语言生成字母（或汉语的音素）类别的成员，然后用另一种语言生成（a）相同类别的成员或（b）不同类别的成员。汉-英双语者也用两种语言命名图片。两种双语者在使用非主导语言生成相同类别中的范例后，主导语言的流畅度均降低，而非主导语言的生成则不受先前在另一种语言中生成相同类别的单词的影响。汉-英双语者，但不是荷兰-英语双语者，在言语流畅性任务的不同字母/音素类别中表现出相似的测试顺序效应。此外，在言语流畅性任务的重复类别条件下表现出显著测试顺序效应的汉-英双语者，在语言切换后命名重复图片时，并未表现出这种效应。这些结果表明双语语言产生中存在多个抑制控制水平。言语流畅性任务中的测试顺序效应确定了双语控制的词汇位置，并且对于某些双语者，即使在不同语言中测试不同类别时也会发现干扰效应，这进一步意味着存在整体语言控制过程，尽管并非所有类型的双语者都具有施加这种全局抑制的能力。
