Project Details
Projekt
Bilingual flexibility: Item- and language-specific situational language balance
Applicant
Dr. Andrea M. Philipp
Subject Area
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548577702
Bilingual flexibility enables bilingual speakers to select and produce words in either of their languages depending on the context – for example using English when talking to an international colleague and German when talking to a family member. To select one language over the other, a speaker’s situational language balance (i.e., the current activation level of both languages) needs to be shifted towards the intended language. Thus, situational language balance resembles a temporary state that is influenced by the speaker’s dispositional (i.e., long-term) language balance and short-term language control, which regulates the situational language balance. This project differentiates between item-specific and language-specific balance and investigates how a speaker’s situational language balance shifts in response to environmental cues. Specifically, it explores whether these shifts occur at the level of individual words (item-specific level) or at the level of the entire language (language-specific level). Cued language-switching experiments, in which a cue indicates in which language the name of a depicted object has to be typed, will be used to manipulate situational language balance at these two levels. At the level of specific items, participants will, for example, name items that are more frequently associated with one than with the other language in daily life. At the level of the language as a whole, socio-cultural stimuli like famous buildings will be used to influence the situational language balance. The resulting activation (shift) for individual items or the language is expected to affect between-language interference and its resolution through short-term language control. The impact of item- and language-specific influences on short-term language control are measured by means of language-switch costs, which are calculated as performance difference between language-switch trials (where the language changes from the previous trial) and language-repetition trials (where the language repeats from the previous trial). Overall, this project will enhance our understanding of how situational language balance at different levels (item vs. language) affects between-language interference and how it interacts with short-term language control.
DFG Programme
Research Units
