Parallel language activation and inhibitory control in bimodal bilinguals.
Findings from recent studies suggest that spoken-language bilinguals engage nonlinguistic inhibitory control mechanisms to resolve cross-linguistic competition during auditory word recognition. Bilingual advantages in inhibitory control might stem from the need to resolve perceptual competition between similar-sounding words both within and between their two languages. If so, these advantages should be lessened or eliminated when there is no perceptual competition between two languages. The present study investigated the extent of inhibitory control recruitment during bilingual language comprehension by examining associations between language co-activation and nonlinguistic inhibitory control abilities in bimodal bilinguals, whose two languages do not perceptually compete. Cross-linguistic distractor activation was identified in the visual world paradigm, and correlated significantly with performance on a nonlinguistic spatial Stroop task within a group of 27 hearing ASL-English bilinguals. Smaller Stroop effects (indexing more efficient inhibition) were associated with reduced co-activation of ASL signs during the early stages of auditory word recognition. These results suggest that inhibitory control in auditory word recognition is not limited to resolving perceptual linguistic competition in phonological input, but is also used to moderate competition that originates at the lexico-semantic level.
San Diego State University, 5250 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182, USA. Electronic address: giezenmr@gmail.com.
Marcel R
MR
Giezen
School of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182-1518, USA. Electronic address: hblumenf@mail.sdsu.edu.
Henrike K
HK
Blumenfeld
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, 2240 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208, USA. Electronic address: a-shook@northwestern.edu.
Anthony
A
Shook
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, 2240 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208, USA. Electronic address: v-marian@northwestern.edu.
Viorica
V
Marian
School of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182-1518, USA. Electronic address: kemmorey@mail.sdsu.edu.
Karen
K
Emmorey
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D012813:Sign Language; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D057190:Stroop Test; D055815:Young Adult
Bimodal bilingualism; Cross-linguistic competition; Inhibitory control; Visual world paradigm