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Extra Language Control Required for Morphological Inflections in Bilingual Word Production
Poster Session C, Friday, October 25, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Great Hall 3 and 4
Qiping Wang1, Hongfu Qu2, Yannan Ji2, Xin Wang3, Junjie Wu2; 1Beijing Normal University, 2Tianjin Normal University, 3Macquarie University
For effective language production, bilinguals must control their two conflicting languages. However, prior investigations have mainly concentrated on words without considering inflection, leaving it unknown how morphological inflection affects language control. To bridge this gap, we conducted two experiments involving Chinese-English bilinguals who speak two languages with distinct inflectional morphologies—inflectional for English and non-inflectional for Chinese. Specifically, participants engaged in language-switching tasks in either Chinese or English, generating uninflected words for singular object pictures in Experiment 1 and producing corresponding uninflected or inflected words for one or two objects in Experiment 2. The outcomes of Experiment 1 reproduced symmetric switching costs and asymmetric mixing costs observed in previous studies, which serve as indices for examining local and global language controls, respectively. Furthermore, we found the symmetric switching costs in Experiment 2, alongside heightened asymmetric mixing costs when participants encountered two objects as opposed to only one. These findings indicate that bilinguals exert greater global control over Chinese when no inflections can express the plurality. In summary, the current study offers pioneering evidence of specific processing stages of bilingual language control with morphological inflectional production. Keywords: bilingual, language control, grammatical encoding, global control, local control.
Topic Areas: Control, Selection, and Executive Processes, Morphology