Abstract
Much of the world's population is bilingual, hence, language selection is a core component of language processing in a significant proportion of individuals. Though language selection has been investigated using artificial cues to language choice such as color, little is known about more ecologically valid cues. We examined with MEG the neurophysiological and behavioral effects of two natural cues: script and cultural context, hypothesizing the former to trigger more automatic language selection. Twenty Arabic-English bilinguals performed a number-naming task with a Match condition, where the cue and target language of response matched, and a Mismatch condition, with opposite instruction. The latter addressed the mechanisms responsible for overriding natural cue-language associations. Early visual responses patterned according to predictions from prior object recognition literature, while at 150–300 ms, the anterior cingulate cortex showed robust sensitivity to cue-type, with enhanced amplitudes to culture trials. In contrast, a mismatch effect for both cue-types was observed at 300–400 ms in the left inferior prefrontal cortex. Our findings provide the first characterization of the spatio-temporal profile of naturally cued language selection and demonstrate that natural but less automatic language-choice, elicited by cultural cues, does not engage the same mechanisms as the clearly unnatural language-choice of our mismatch tasks.
Highlights
Any message can be transmitted in a number of different ways, every time an individual speaks, a selection of specific lexical items needs to be achieved
Our analyses focused on testing whether the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the left inferior prefrontal cortex (LIPC), previously implicated for bilingual language selection in production tasks, would be engaged when using natural cues to language choice and whether they would show sensitivity to differences in the properties of these cues
We tested the strength of the observed Cue effect in Experiment 1 and found that data for first 10 participants was sufficient for the effect to be reliable (left BA24 (175– 258 ms; p = 0.02), left BA32 (150–256 ms; p = 0.008, left BA33 (150–259 ms; p = 0.005), right BA24 (176–300 ms; p = 0), right BA32 (159–300 ms; p = 0.02), and right BA33 (171–2300 ms; p = 0.003)
Summary
Any message can be transmitted in a number of different ways, every time an individual speaks, a selection of specific lexical items needs to be achieved. In addition to the usual selection demands, bilingual individuals need to choose the appropriate language in which each concept will be expressed. The role of more naturalistic cues in language choice has not been characterized. Using script and cultural context as natural cues and taking advantage of the millisecond by millisecond resolution of magnetoencephalography (MEG), we examine how naturalistic cues are processed and whether the brain mechanisms of language choice are modulated by the nature of the cue. We aimed to test the intuition that script provides a more automatic link to language than cultural context, both are clearly ecologically valid
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