The Effect Of Executive Control Training On Chinese-English Bilingual Language Control

At present,more and more studies believe that bilinguals have certain advantages in executive control function,and believe that this stems from the multilingual use control process of bilinguals to avoid linguistic interference from unexpected languages.However,it is controversial whether the bilingual language control(BLC)process is an example of the domain-general executive control(EC).Previous studies have mainly examined the relationship between long-term bilingual experience and short-term language learning training on the role of executive control,current research study from another perspective is the impact of executive control training on bilingual use and control,and further explains the relationship between bilingual language control and executive control functions.In the experiment,Simon arrow task was used to perform executive control training for participants with different working memory refresh capabilities.At the same time,a pre-test and two post-tests of the language switching task are performed before the training task,one week after the training task,and four months later.Another group of homogeneous participants was selected as the control group.The control group did not participate in the executive control training,but only tested the language switching task.The results showed that:(1)There is a significant difference in participants'switching costs before and after training on executive control tasks,the switching cost of the language switching task was decreased after training,and the switching cost was also decreased in the second post-test;(2)compared with the participants with high working memory refresh,the participants with low working memory refresh ability showed a more obvious tendency to reduce the cost of language switching after training;(3)Before and after training,the response time from the first language to the second language(L1-L2)was faster than that from the second language to the first language(L2-L1),showing the unbalanced effect of language switching cost.The results show that executive control training can promote the language control of Chinese and English bilinguals,especially for the participants with low working memory refresh,and the effect of executive control training has a long-term effect.However,executive control training can not fully compensate for the role of language experience,and it still shows the unbalanced effect of language switch after executive control training.Therefore,bilingual's language control and executive control have some connection or overlap in cognitive processing mechanism,but bilingual's language control has its own cognitive mechanism which is specific to executive control function.