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From the Individual Bilingual Background to the EEG Signal : towards a multifactorial continuous representation of the cognitive cost of French-English code-switching.
Poster Session B, Wednesday, September 30, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Théo Déruelle1, Coriandre Vilain1, Anne Vilain1; 1Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France
Code-switching constitutes one of the main characteristics of bilingualism. The cognitive processes underlying a switch between languages have been studied for nearly thirty years. However, contradictory outcomes have been observed in regards to the presence and weight of a switching cost. For instance, while some studies reported a significant asymmetrical switching cost on a cued-picture naming paradigm (Meuter & Allport, 1999; Costa & Santesteban, 2004, Experiment 1), others observed a fairly symmetrical cost (Christoffels et al., 2007; Costa & Santesteban, 2004, Experiments 2–4). Several reasons have been raised as to explain this difference, such as daily switching experience (Christoffels et al., 2007), or cue-stimulus interval lengths (Verhoef et al., 2009). As to voluntary-switching paradigms, recent studies reported no switching costs at all in bilinguals who freely switched languages (Blanco-Elorietta & Pylkkänen, 2017; Zhu et al., 2022), in direct contradiction with the results of other studies using the same paradigm (De Bruin et al., 2018; Kennis et al., 2024). Over the last few years, one element started to emerge as a potential key to explain such discrepancies: the individual bilingual background (Kheder & Kaan, 2021; Soares et al., 2021). It seems that elements such as language proficiency, code-switching frequency and the age of acquisition might play a significant role in shaping an individual’s cognitive control on language. The present study aims at reducing the existing gap between those studies by exploring the influence that individual factors are having on the neural and behavioural costs associated to code-switching. For this, we will operate a double-condition EEG paradigm on a range of French-English bilinguals, all differing in terms of individual bilingual background. We will make our measurements using both a cued and a voluntary picture-naming language-switching tasks. We will then analyse their reaction times, as well as three electrophysiological markers traditionally associated with cognitive control: the N2 ERP component (Kennis et al., 2024; Jiao et al., 2022), the alpha oscillations (Zhang et al., 2023; Prasad & Beste, 2025) as well as midfrontal theta oscillations (Kennis et al., 2024; Cui et al., 2024; Prasad & Beste, 2025), and will correlate their inter-individual modulations with the individual factors registered for each participant. We suggest that balanced bilinguals who are highly proficient and code-switch frequently will have their switching cost reduced, in ways that N2 and brain oscillations amplitudes will be lower compared to other bilinguals, reflecting an adapted system which relies less on inhibition. We also hypothesize that the most code-switching trained of our unbalanced bilingual subjects will show higher N2 amplitude compared to the other unbalanced participants, reflecting a more optimized bilingual control, as suggested by previous studies (Kang et al., 2023). These potential results would allow us to advocate for a change in the way bilingualism is perceived in research. Instead of conceiving it as a state that is equal in all bilingual individuals, perhaps it would be time to start putting this “individual bilingual history” at the centre of research.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Control, Selection, and Executive Processes