Mental control and language selection

Extract

A surprisingly large part of the population of the world is at least bilingual. The question as to how people are able to control their language system is an important one and has been a topic for highly active research in recent years. Until now, models have been quite simplistic, but Green places his model in a wider framework of attention and control, drawing our attention to the fact that the mechanisms involved in language control share basic properties with the systems in other cognitive domains. Green introduces the (not language-specific) supervisory attentional system in combination with language task schemas which make it possible to adapt to the situation in which the bilingual system is functioning. Models of bilingual processing should be able to explain how lexical processing is affected by, among others, task demands (see also Dijkstra, van Jaarsveld, and ten Brinke, 1998). By adding a general mechanism of attentional control that is independently motivated by general cognitive mechanisms, Green has enriched his previous model considerably. In what follows we will first make some general remarks about the model Green proposes. In the second part we will discuss some recent results from our group that nicely tie in with some of the basic properties of the model outlined by Green.