Martin, C. 1 , Vanden Bulcke, C. 2 , Navarra, J. 3 , Schoonbaert, S. 2 , Hartsuiker, R. 2 & Costa, A. 1, 4
1 Departament de Tecnologies de la Informació i les Comunicacions. Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Barcelona, Spain
2 Department of Experimental Psychology. University of Ghent. Ghent, Belgium
3 Fundació Sant Joan de Déu. Barcelona, Spain
4 ICREA. Barcelona, SPain
When we are used to speak one language with someone, we usually feel uncomfortable speaking with him/her in another language. This leads bilingual speakers to have singular conversations in which they switch the language continuously (as, for example, three bilingual speakers: speaker A speaking one language with speaker B and the other one with speaker C). These surprising conversations happen regularly in bilingual communities even if switching between languages has certain cognitive costs. We hypothesise that these singular conversations might be due to strong bottom-up effects originating from the stimulus-response binding between familiar faces and their associated language. Overriding this learnt link (that is, speaking with someone in another language than the usual one) might, according to our hypothesis, require costly top-down effects.
To test this hypothesis, we performed a language production task primed by familiar faces. Spanish-Catalan bilinguals were familiarised by means of interactions with twelve actors, six Catalan- and six Spanish-speakers. In the test phase, participants were presented with an actor producing a noun and were instructed to produce a semantically related verb, in the same language as the one used by the actor. Crucially for our purposes, actors were producing the nouns in the language they used during the habituation phase (congruent) or in the other language (incongruent). Considering only trials without language switch, participants were significantly slower to produce language in the incongruent condition, suggesting that incongruity in the face-language binding carries some cognitive costs.
This observation might have important implications for language control in bilingualism: Bilinguals might not fully control their language production as language selection is highly driven by bottom-up information coming from external cues such as familiar faces.