Lexical production and cognitive control in sequential bilinguals immersed in two different contexts of language use

Abstract

Recent investigations have highlighted that the linguistic characteristics of the contexts in which bilinguals are immersed might account for processing differences both at the lexical and cognitive levels. The present study examined the extent to which verbal and non-verbal cognitive performance in bilinguals varied as a function of two different contexts of language use: separate or integrated. The separate context was characterized by participants’ use of Spanish and English in specific situations and with different interlocutors, whereas the integrated context was characterized by the frequent use of both languages in the same situations and with the same interlocutors. Participants were two groups of young Mexican-born sequential Spanish-L1–English-L2 bilinguals ( n = 50, 34 females), who reported either the separate or integrated use of both languages. We found a positive correlation between overall linguistic exposure and the number of words produced in English in a Category Fluency task for bilinguals in the integrated context. Our results also showed that more frequent code-switching positively correlated with the magnitude of the interference effect as measured with a Flanker task, but only for participants in the separate context. These results suggest that the separate or more integrated use of the more dominant language (L1) and the less dominant one (L2) can impact bilinguals’ performance differently in verbal and non-verbal cognitive tasks.