Multiple levels of bilingual language control: evidence from language intrusions in reading aloud

Abstract

Bilinguals rarely produce words in an unintended language. However, we induced such intrusion errors (e.g., saying el instead of he) in 32 Spanish-English bilinguals who read aloud single-language (English or Spanish) and mixed-language (haphazard mix of English and Spanish) paragraphs with English or Spanish word order. These bilinguals produced language intrusions almost exclusively in mixed-language paragraphs, and most often when attempting to produce dominant-language targets (accent-only errors also exhibited reversed language-dominance effects). Most intrusion errors occurred for function words, especially when they were not from the language that determined the word order in the paragraph. Eye movements showed that fixating a word in the nontarget language increased intrusion errors only for function words. Together, these results imply multiple mechanisms of language control, including (a) inhibition of the dominant language at both lexical and sublexical processing levels, (b) special retrieval mechanisms for function words in mixed-language utterances, and (c) attentional monitoring of the target word for its match with the intended language.

Keywords: bilingualism; eye movements; intrusion error; language control; lexical access; phonology; reading aloud; speech error.

Fig. 1

The average number of errors of each type produced in each target language (collapsed across condition). Error bars show standard errors by language.

Fig. 2

The average number of intrusion errors for content or function words in English versus Spanish word order paragraphs in each language divided by the number of opportunities to err for each target type. Error bars show standard errors by English or Spanish word order.

Fig. 3

For each type of target word (content or function) that was produced as a cross-language intrusion error, the percent of cases in which bilinguals were looking directly at the target word, at words in the same language, or at words in a different language (on left), along with the relevant control trials (on right) in which other bilinguals produced those same targets correctly.