The Duality And Adaptivity Of Inhibition In L2 Production

One major theme of the inhibitory control model, the widely recognized bilingual language production model, is that the L1 language will be inhibited in L2 language production. Controversies arise, however, concerning the pattern of inhibition:whether it is global inhibition of the non-target language or it is local inhibition of the translation equivalents.When recognition inhibition is taken into account, global inhibition and local inhibition are found corresponding to preactive inhibition and reactive inhibition respectively. Grounded on recent researches and enlightened by the descriptive details of preactive & reactive inhibition given by DMC (dual mechanisms of control framework), the present paper suggested that the pattern of inhibition in L2 production feature duality and adaptivity. That is, the pattern of inhibition in L2 production is likely to be:1) a dual one in which global inhibition and local inhibition co-exist; 2) a dynamic one adaptive to changes of L2 proficiency and language modes.To testify this hypothesis,96 bilinguals of different levels (high-level, medium-level and low-level) participated in present research. To explore their inhibition patterns under conditions of monolingual, bilingual and mixed modes, those participants'response time to picture-picture interference naming, blocked naming and mixed naming was collected. The results showed different patterns of inhibition for the three-level bilinguals. For high-levels, monolingual mode triggered global inhibition, alternative mode triggered both global and local inhibition, and mixing mode triggered local inhibition. For medium levels, monolingual mode also triggered global inhibition, but no difference was detected in bilingual and mixed mode, in which both global and local inhibition occurred. Only local inhibition was found in low levels regardless of the language modes.The results support the hypothesis that the inhibition in L2 production could be dual and adaptive. Such hypothesis, however, is not universal, it proves true only when bilinguals' vocabulary in L2 meets the requirement of establishing the L2 language schema in their brains.