Project Details
Projekt
Bilingual Flexibility: The Impact of Background Language on Verbal Performance and Situational Language Balance
Subject Area
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548577702
In today’s increasingly multilingual world, bilingual flexibility—the ability to adjust language use to situational contexts—is essential. Bilinguals frequently find themselves in environments where multiple known languages coexist, such as workplaces or social settings. This can involve performing tasks in one language while being exposed to background speech in another known language. This research project investigates how background speech in bilinguals’ first (L1) or second language (L2) affects cognitive performance across different tasks conducted in L1 or L2, providing insights into a situationally adapted language balance and the role of bilingual language control. By integrating research on bilingual language control and the Irrelevant Speech Effect, the project explores how background speech influences cross-language interference, and the control mechanisms needed to maintain task performance. Using well-established experimental paradigms to measure cognitive performance (e.g., serial recall, picture naming) and electrophysiological methods (EEG), we examine behavioural effects of background speech on verbal task performance and identify neural markers of auditory distraction and cross-language interference. The project consists of two complementary research lines. Line A investigates how background speech impacts verbal short-term memory based on linguistic task demands and the language of both focal task and background speech (L1 vs. L2). Line B investigates lexical selection processes during speech production and their neural correlates under varying background speech conditions and task languages. A final work package consolidates findings through mega-analytic data analysis to reveal overarching patterns of bilingual language regulation in multilingual settings. This project advances understanding of bilingual flexibility by highlighting how bilinguals adapt their cognitive and linguistic processing to effectively navigate multi-language environments.
DFG Programme
Research Units
