Chapter 10
Language control and executive control
Can studies on language processing distinguish the two?
In this paper, we review recent literature on the cognitive benefits of bilingualism and suggest that studies focusing on language processing can provide insights in the debate surrounding the “bilingual advantage hypothesis”. We argue that cross-language priming can be a useful research tool, because it recruits different types of abilities, some of which may not be language-specific. Specifically, we claim that the mechanism that allows speakers to correctly select the target language in cross-language priming may be the same that is needed in cognitive tasks to alternate between different sets of rules. We further argue that the choice of a specific linguistic structure is, by contrast, governed by processes that are purely linguistic in nature.
Article outline
- 1.Bilingual language processing and cognition
- 2.Syntactic priming as a research tool
- 3.Does inhibition play a role in cross-language priming?
- 4.Method
- 4.1The priming task
- 4.2The cognitive task
- 4.3Coding
- 5.Results
- 5.1The bilingual group
- 5.2The bilingual vs. the monolingual group
- 5.3Interaction between Noswitch and DCCS
- 6.Discussion and conclusion
-
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Rosso, Aline Casagrande, Ana Karina Paz Pereira & Ana Beatriz Arêas da Luz Fontes
2021.
A relação entre leitura em L2 e funções executivas.
Cadernos de Linguística 2:4
► pp. e442 ff.
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