Language control after phrasal planning: Playing Whack-a-mole with language switch costs

Abstract

Spanish-English (Experiments 1–2) or Chinese-English (Experiment 3) bilinguals described arrays of moving pictures in English that began with a complex or a simple phrase (e.g., “[The shoe and the mesa/桌子] moved above the cloud” vs. “[The shoe] moved above the mesa/桌子 and the cloud”). Bilinguals were trained to name the second picture in English for half the objects (e.g., “table”) and Spanish/Chinese (e.g., “mesa”/“桌子”) the other half. In complex-initial sentences, production durations of “shoe” and “and” were longer on switch than nonswitch trials; in simple-initial sentences, in Experiments 1–2, speech rate was not affected by switching until “mesa” was produced, and in Experiment 3 not until “above” was produced. Thus, bilinguals paid language switch costs just before or just as they started to produce a phrase with a language switch in it, suggesting that bilinguals complete phrasal planning in the default language before switching to the nondefault language.