Language Control During Free Sentence Production: Cued and Voluntary Switching

Language control is the process that manages cross-language interference, helping multilinguals to successfully adapt their language choice to a given linguistic environment. Traditionally, language control has been investigated using language-switching experiments that rely on cued picture naming. However, in real-life settings, language choice is not always externally imposed, and language production involves complex and varied syntactic constructions beyond the single-word level. Here, we present findings from French-English bilinguals who switched between languages from one sentence to the other, parting from an action description task. We compared findings from two linguistic contexts: one wherein participants could freely choose when to switch (voluntary language switching) and one wherein they were told when to switch (cued language switching). Overall, our reaction time and filled pause analyses showed no significant switch costs during cued language switching. During voluntary language switching, we observed significant switch costs in second language and a repetition cost in first language. Our findings contrast with those encountered in single-word production experiments and highlight the importance of studying bilingual language control in ecologically valid environments.