Ibáñez, A. 1 , Morales, L. 2 & Bajo, M. T. 2
1 Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language (bcbl)
2 University of Granada
The asymmetric switching cost between languages has been widely found in bilingual production tasks (Meuter and Allport, 1999). This asymmetry has been suggested to be the result of a top-down inhibitory process directed to the language not in use. However, alternative explanations have been proposed as well (Finkbeiner, Janssen, Almeida, Caramazza, 2006). The goal of the current study is to investigate the relationship between the asymmetric cost and top-down processes. In order to do so, we designed a sentence reading task for later repetition in which two types of color cues indicated the language of the sentence. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with the cues immediately before the appearance of sentences (external language cuing); in Experiment 2, the language of the sentence was cued by the color of the first word (internal language cuing). Our rationale was that external cuing would strengthen the top-down processes, while internal cuing would not elicit a top down expectancy of the language of the sentences. Then, if the asymmetric cost is an index of inhibitory control, we would expect that switching asymmetries will be more pronounced in the case of external cuing.