< Back to previous page

Project

The what, how, and who of proactive language control. (FWOAL1029)

Whenever multilinguals produce language, both languages are
activated to some degree and compete with each other. Language
control is the process used to minimize this cross-language
interference and select words in the appropriate language during
multilingual language processing. While ample research has
investigated language control, most studies investigated reactive
language control, which entails the control process that is initiated
when the non-target language disrupts the selection of target
language words. Very little research has gone into proactive
language control, which entails the control process implemented as
an anticipation of any non-target language interference disrupting the
selection of target language words. This means that many
fundamental questions regarding proactive language control remain
unresolved. In a series of experiments, we set out to explore the
unresolved what (is there proactive language control when producing
in the first language?), how (does language control rely on inhibition
of the non-target language or additional activation of the target
language?), and who (is proactive language control also
implemented by bidialectals?) questions of proactive language
control.
Date:1 Jan 2022 →  Today
Keywords:Language production, Multilingualism, Language control
Disciplines:Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics