The current study aims to investigate how Field independent (FI) and Field-dependent (FD) cognitive styles modulate bilingual language control during a joint language switching task. The cognitive styles were measured by the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT). The FI group with a preference for autonomous information processing was sensitive to…

A key index of top-down control in task switching--preparation for a switch--is underexplored in language switching. The well-documented EEG "signature" of preparation for a task switch--a protracted positive-polarity modulation over the posterior scalp--has thus far not been reported in language switching, and the interpretation of…

Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-2 is the "gold standard" autism spectrum disorder observational assessment, and it is increasingly used in South Africa. However, its use is limited to English speakers, as it has not been translated into the country's other 10 official languages. Moreover, the cultural appropriateness of this tool…

Recent research has shown that distinct event-related potential (ERP) signatures are associated with switching between languages compared to switching between dialects or registers (e.g., Khamis-Dakwar & Froud, 2007; Moreno, Federmeier & Kutas, 2002). The current investigation builds on these findings to examine whether contrastive and…

In highly proficient, early bilinguals, behavioural studies of the cost of switching language or task suggest qualitative differences between language control and domain-general cognitive control. By contrast, several neuroimaging studies have shown an overlap of the brain areas involved in language control and domain-general cognitive control.…

Bilinguals sometimes outperform age-matched monolinguals on non-language tasks involving cognitive control. But the bilingual advantage is not consistently found in every experiment and may reflect specific attributes of the bilinguals tested. The goal of this dissertation was to determine if the way in which bilinguals use language, specifically…

Bilinguals must focus their attention to control competing languages. In bilingual aphasia, damage to the fronto-subcortical loop may lead to pathological language switching and mixing and the attrition of the more automatic language (usually L1). We present the case of JZ, a bilingual Basque-Spanish 53-year-old man who, after haematoma in the…

A key question in bilingual language production research is how bilingual individuals control the use of their two languages. The psycholinguistic literature concerning language control is unresolved. It is a matter of controversy whether (a) issues to do with control are central to understanding bilingual language processing; and (b) if they are,…

Two experiments tested language switching effects with bilingual participants in a priming paradigm with masked primes (duration of 50ms in Experiment 1 and 100ms in Experiment 2). Participants had to monitor target words for animal names, and ERPs were recorded to critical (non-animal) words in L1 and L2 primed by unrelated words from the same or…

We present two bilingual patients without language disorders in whom involuntary language switching was induced. The first patient switched from Dutch to English during a left-sided amobarbital (Wada) test. Functional magnetic resonance imaging yielded a predominantly left-sided language distribution similar for both languages. The second patient…

In this paper an overview of research on the multilingual lexicon is presented as the basis for a model for processing multiple languages. With respect to specific issues relating to the processing of more than two languages, it is suggested that there is no need to develop a specific model for such multilingual processing, but at the same time we…