Project Details
Projekt
Bilingual flexibility: Partner-adapted language balance and bilingual switching in social interaction
Subject Area
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548577702
Language is a fundamental tool for social interaction. Yet little is known about how bilingual language production unfolds in interactive contexts. Speaking in a non-dominant language requires flexible regulation of language accessibility to align with situational demands – a state that we call situational language balance. We propose that social interaction provides a powerful context for such adjustments. This project investigates how bilingual language production is shaped by two key features of social interaction, organized into two complementary project lines. Project Line A examines how speakers adapt their language choice based on the language background of the interaction partner. Specifically, we investigate how a partner’s language background influences a speaker’s situational language balance, favouring the mutually shared language(s). Project Line B focuses on bilingual turn-taking, exploring the mutual influence of speech production and comprehension in joint language switching. Here, we examine how situational language balance is dynamically shaped by both speakers’ recent language use during joint bilingual language switching. Both project lines focus on the lexical level, employing bilingual picture-naming tasks to measure naming latencies as indicators of situational language balance. Additionally, event-related potentials (ERPs) will offer insights into the cognitive processes underlying these adjustments. By examining how speakers adapt their language use to social partners and contexts, this project aligns directly with the Research Unit’s core premise that a bilingual’s language balance flexibly adjusts to situational demands. Our findings will advance understanding of the mechanisms governing bilingual language production in socially interactive settings.
DFG Programme
Research Units
