Bilingual Language Production

Abstract

One of the main differences between monolingual and bilingual language production is that during the latter word representations of both languages become activated. This parallel language activation is assumed to result in cross-language interference, which can hamper bilingual language production. Bilinguals handle this challenge by implementing language control, a process used to minimize cross-language interference during bilingual language production and to select words in the appropriate language. In this chapter, we discuss theoretical concepts and empirical findings (i.e., asymmetrical switch costs, reversed language dominance, and language mixing costs) regarding language control in different linguistic contexts (i.e., single language, dual language, and dense code-switching contexts). Next to a discussion of how language control differs in specific linguistic contexts, we also highlight several issues that still need to be addressed in the language control literature.