Abstract This study investigates bilingual language control across comprehension and production. In three experiments, Chinese–English bilinguals alternated between tasks on every trial. In the comprehension task, participants judged the meaning of a written word (Experiment 1) or a spoken word (Experiments 2 and 3) in either language. In the production task, they named pictures in only one language (Experiments 1 and 2) or in either language (Experiment 3), with half of the trials involving language switching. Thus, salient visual language cues were available only in Experiment 1, and within-production language switching occurred only in Experiment 3. Language switch costs from comprehension to production emerged only in Experiment 2, where spoken word comprehension was paired with single-language production. These findings suggest that reduced saliency of language cues encourages a shared language control mechanism across comprehension and production when within-production control demands are low, supporting the adaptive nature of bilingual language control.
Li et al. (Wed,) studied this question.