Performance Accuracy Affected by Control Over Bilingual Language Production: A study of balanced L2 users
Julia Festman, Antoni Rodríguez‐Fornells, Thomas Frank Münte · 2008
Recent research suggests that bilinguals cope with non-target language interference by recruiting “executive function ” brain areas. However, it remains unclear whether all bilinguals are able to prevent interference to the same extend. In this project, 30 bilingual speakers of Russian and German were tested in two language tasks: (1) In a picture-naming task, black-on-white line drawings of objects had to be named in a cued target language (Russian or German), which was changed on a regular schedule. (2) In a verbal fluency task, subjects were asked to produce unique words in one language belonging to a semantic category (e.g., animals, or clothing), or starting with a certain letter (e.g., S-). Participants were explicitly instructed to use only the target language, which was predefined by the experimenter. Occurrences of interference, defined as the involuntary use of the non-target language during target language production, were considered as inaccurate performance due to failures of control with regard to the language, whereas substitution errors reflected inaccurate performance with regard to the content.