The Neural Cost of the Auditory Perception of Language Switches

Bilingual subjects continuously face the challenge of controlling their two languages during communication to avoid interference from the nontarget language (Hernandez et al. 2005). There is an ongoing debate on how bilinguals correctly select the target language and on what neurocognitive mechanisms they rely. Most of the behavioral evidence about the nature of language selection comes from switching paradigms during language production (Amrhein, 1999; Costa and Santesteban, 2004; Hernandez and Kohnert, 1999; Meuter and Allport, 1999). In these tasks, participants are asked to name pictures alternating between their two languages. The difference in naming latencies between switch and nonswitch trials is referred to as the “language-switching cost.”