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Language control abilities of late bilinguals*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2011

JULIA FESTMAN
JULIA FESTMAN*
Affiliation:
University of Potsdam/PRIM, Germany
*
Address for correspondence: University of Potsdam, Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism (PRIM), Haus 2, Campus Golm, Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 24–25, 14476 Potsdam, Germany[email protected]
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Abstract

Although all bilinguals encounter cross-language interference (CLI), some bilinguals are more susceptible to interference than others. Here, we report on language performance of late bilinguals (Russian/German) on two bilingual tasks (interview, verbal fluency), their language use and switching habits. The only between-group difference was CLI: one group consistently produced significantly more errors of CLI on both tasks than the other (thereby replicating our findings from a bilingual picture naming task). This striking group difference in language control ability can only be explained by differences in cognitive control, not in language proficiency or language mode.

Keywords

language controllanguage proficiencyinterferenceerror analysislanguage modeswitching attitude
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , July 2012 , pp. 580 - 593
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Thomas Münte and Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells for expert suggestions on the entire research project, and to acknowledge Sofie Derheim, Anne Neubauer, Hanna Rudolph and Natasha Metelski for helping with data collection, and Jan-Ole Schümann for programming the experiments. The research reported in this paper has been supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG) to JF and was carried out at the University of Magdeburg. I am grateful to all participants who volunteered in this study. Additionally I thank the BLC referees for their contribution to the paper.

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