Bilingual language control during single-language production: Does relocation to a new linguistic environment change it?

A bilingual’s two languages are simultaneously active and competing for selection, even when a single language is being used. To manage this competition, bilinguals apply language control. We firstly examined how bilinguals apply this control in two single-language tasks differing in their demands on lexical selection. Second, we examined how this language control might adapt to the language environment a bilingual lives in. To do this, we conducted a longitudinal study with Mandarin-English bilinguals who moved from China to the UK and compared them to a control group staying in China. Participants completed a picture-naming task in which they had to retrieve one specific word in response to a picture and a verbal-fluency task in which they had to generate words belonging to a semantic category. Both tasks were completed twice, approximately seven months apart. Both tasks showed that bilinguals applied language control over the language they were not currently using. Furthermore, this language control did not concern specific words only but was observed across the bilinguals’ lexicon more globally, suggesting it was applied proactively to manage the anticipated language competition. However, this language control did not change after relocation to the UK, nor did it differ between the groups. This suggests that while language control is a core part of language production, the language environment a bilingual lives in might not have a defining impact on the exact way this language control is applied.