Language Control

In the previous chapters we have seen that when bilinguals are conversing with their interlocutors in one of their languages the mental system that stores the other language is not completely at rest. In general a picture emerged of a bilingual linguistic system that is noisier than the language system of monolingual language users because, during both language comprehension and language production, linguistic elements of both linguistic subsystems are activated. Yet, when witnessing bilinguals partaking in conversations that are intended to be unilingual, it is obvious that they are quite successful at coping with this extra fierce mental rivalry. Generally, if a bilingual has selected one language for current use, his or her speech contains few intrusions of the non-selected language, and misunderstandings arising from mistaking an input for a word in the other language are rare. Apparently, some efficient mental control mechanism is at work that prevents such infelicities from hampering the conversation flow, a mechanism that enables the bilingual to mentally control the language of input and output. In addition to generally

guaranteeing language-pure comprehension and production in such “monolingual” circumstances (where a single language is selected for use), the mechanism involved must also enable language control in translation situations, where there is input in one language (usually called the source language) while output in the other language (the target language) must be produced. Here switching off one linguistic subsystem (if such were possible at all) is not a feasible option because the translation act requires the parallel involvement of both languages. Alternatively, rapid mental switching between the two linguistic subsystems must take place. In this chapter I will present a number of views on language control in bilinguals; that is, on how they manage to adapt their language use to the specific requirements of the current communicative context, selecting one of their two languages or using both languages in translation.