The impact of a momentary language switch on bilingual reading: Intense at the switch but merciful downstream for L2 but not L1 readers.

Abstract

We investigated whether cross-language activation is sensitive to shifting language demands and language experience during first and second language (i.e., L1, L2) reading. Experiment 1 consisted of L1 French-L2 English bilinguals reading in the L2, and Experiment 2 consisted of L1 English-L2 French bilinguals reading in the L1. Both groups read English sentences with target words serving as indices of cross-language activation: cross-language homographs, cognates, and matched language-unique control words. Critically, we manipulated whether English sentences contained a momentary language switch into French before downstream target words. This allowed us to assess the consequences of shifting language demands, both in the moment, and residually following a switch as a function of language experience. Switches into French were associated with a reading cost at the switch site for both L2 and L1 readers. However, downstream cross-language activation was larger following a switch only for L1 readers. These results suggest that cross-language activation is jointly sensitive to momentary shifts in language demands and language experience, likely reflecting different control demands faced by L2 versus L1 readers, consistent with models of bilingual processing that ascribe a primary role for language control. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).