Robbins & Myers Inc, USA

Abstract

What is the relationship between bilingual language control (BLC) mechanisms and domain-general executive control (EC) processes? Do these two domains share some of their mechanisms? Here, we take a novel approach to this question, investigating whether short-term language switching training improves non-linguistic task switching performance. Two groups of bilinguals were assigned to two different protocols; one group was trained in language switching (switching-task training group) another group was trained in blocked language picture naming (single-block training group). Both groups performed a non-linguistic and linguistic switching task before (pre-training) and after training (post-training). Non-linguistic and linguistic switch costs decreased to a greater extent for the switching-task training than for the single-block training group from pre- to post-training. In contrast, mixing costs showed similar reductions for both groups. This suggests short-term language switching training can transfer to the non-linguistic domain for certain sub-mechanisms (i.e., switch cost). Thus, there is some overlap of the control mechanisms across domains.