Cross-language competition in bilingual production

Until recently, cognitive science virtually ignored the fact that most people of the world are bilingual. In the past decade this situation has changed markedly. There is now an appreciation that learning and using more than one language is a natural circumstance of cognition. Recent studies investigating adult L2 performance have shown that both languages are engaged when only a single language is required. The observed activity of the two languages and the interactions between them, even once bilinguals achieve a high level of L2 skill, suggests that acquisition is not a matter of developing an encapsulated representation for the L2 that becomes functionally independent of the L1. Under ordinary circumstances, bilinguals do not suffer the consequences of cross-language competition, suggesting that they have an elegant mechanism of cognitive control that allows them to effectively select the intended language. The focus of much of the current psycholinguistic research is to understand how bilinguals negotiate the parallel activity of the two languages and the cognitive consequences that result in response to cross-language competition. In this talk I present a series of recent studies on bilingual production that serve to illustrate the models and methods that have adopted to examine these issues.