Inhibitory Control Mechanism Of Bilingual Production And Comprehension

With the development of globalization,bilinguals with their language learning and using have become one of the hottest issues in our lives.Bilinguals usually need to switch between their two languages fluently to adjust to the proper language environment,thus,inhibition control is very important for them.Besides,since language production and comprehension interweaved tightly with several overlap representations,it’s important for us to consider these two processes in the same study.Based on Inhibition Control Model proposed by Green(1998)and the interagated language theory proposed by Pickering and Garrod(2013),inhibition control may work both in language production and comprehension.However,most studies explored this mechanism separately in production or comprehension(e.g.,Declerck et al.,2015;Jackson,Swainson,Cunnington,& Jackson,2001;Chauncey et al.,2008;Hosoda et al.,2012)while we want to use joint naming task(e.g.,Gambi & Hartsuiker,2016)to simulate natural environment to explore inhibition control mechanism.This study conducted language switching paradigm to explore language inhibition control mechanism in a joint naming task.We collected the data of pairs of participants through Electroencephalogram(EEG)and functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI)and analyzed the data in several ways.Results showed that people induced a larger LPC in L2 within person trials compared to L1 ones in switching during stimulus-locked period in comprehension.Time-frequency analysis showed that during the later cue-locked period(350-500 ms)in the cross-person condition,the delta and theta oscillations associated with production were smaller than comprehension.During the stimulus-locked period(270-370 ms & 450-650 ms),it was just the contrary.This may indicated that people recruit similar inhibition control mechanism with different strengths in production and comprehension.Our fMRI data of L2-L1 during switching showed that participants activated precentral gyrus,postcentral gyrus and superior frontal gyrus.Analysis of region of interest(ROI)showed a main effect of person switching.Specifically,people used more inhibition during cross person trials in production while used less in comprehension.Our research exhibits that people may partly share some inhibition control mechanism during language production and comprehension in language switching.