Roembke Tanja C, Philipp Andrea M, Koch Iring
Chair of Cognitive and Experimental Psychology, Institute of Psychology, RWTH Aachen University, DE.
J Cogn. 2022 Apr 11;5(1):27. doi: 10.5334/joc.219. eCollection 2022.
Multilinguals often switch between the languages they speak. One open question is to what extent they can use anticipatory-or proactive-language control to reduce interference from non-target languages during language switching. In three experiments, unbalanced German-English bilinguals (N = 24; N = 35; N = 37) named pictures in their L1 or L2 in mixed blocks. In all but the penultimate block, the language sequence in which pictures were named was predictable (e.g., L1, L1, L2, L2, etc.), thus allowing participants to prepare for upcoming trials. Performance in the non-predictable block was compared to average performance in predictable sequence blocks right before and after, thus controlling for practice effects. We predicted that language switching would be facilitated during predictable language trials, indicative of proactive language control. However, for Experiments 1-2, there was no evidence for a predictability benefit across both experiments. When the number of items that had to be switched between was reduced to two (Experiment 3), a limited repetition-specific predictability effect emerged. These findings suggest that people do not use preparatory processes endogenously on the basis of regularities in the language sequence to reduce interference during language switching, unless the specific item that needs to be produced can be anticipated.
多语言者经常在他们所说的语言之间进行切换。一个悬而未决的问题是，他们在多大程度上能够运用预期性或主动性的语言控制，以减少语言切换过程中来自非目标语言的干扰。在三项实验中，德语-英语不平衡双语者（N = 24；N = 35；N = 37）在混合组块中用他们的第一语言或第二语言命名图片。除了倒数第二个组块外，所有组块中图片命名的语言顺序都是可预测的（例如，L1、L1、L2、L2等），这样参与者就可以为即将到来的试验做好准备。将不可预测组块中的表现与前后可预测顺序组块的平均表现进行比较，从而控制练习效应。我们预测，在可预测的语言试验中，语言切换会更容易，这表明存在主动性语言控制。然而，在实验1-2中，两个实验都没有证据表明存在可预测性优势。当必须切换的项目数量减少到两个时（实验3），出现了有限的特定于重复的可预测性效应。这些发现表明，人们不会基于语言序列的规律内生地使用准备过程来减少语言切换过程中的干扰，除非能够预测需要产出的特定项目。
