Branzi, F. M. . 1 , FitzPatrick, I. 1 , Abutalebi, J. 2 & Costa, A. 1, 3
1 Departament de Tecnologies de la Informació i les Comunicacions, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
2 Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Milan, Italy
3 Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, Barcelona, Spain
Although Bilingual language control is commonly considered to be subsidiary to the domain-general executive control functioning, there are few experimental studies that directly investigate whether this is the case. One way to do so is to compare participants’ performances on a task that involves a switch between two languages with performances on a non-linguistic task that requires a switch between two task-sets. A differential pattern of switch costs between the tasks might be taken to reflect the recruitment of control processes specific to bilingual language control. We tested bilingual speakers while they performed a picture naming and a size decision task, both organised in three blocks (e.g., NameL1-NameL2-NameL1; or Bigger-Smaller-Bigger than a shoebox). The crucial comparison was between the first and the third block (in which participants had to return to the initial language or task set). In the linguistic task, returning to the initial language induced a cognitive cost (more positive ERP components and slower RTs) whereas, in the non-linguistic task, recovering a previously performed task produced a facilitation effect. The differential ERP and RT patterns between the two tasks suggest that bilingual language control should not be considered as an instance of domain-general executive control.