The Influence Of Language Control On Executive Control

The essence of language is for communication.With the acceleration of the process of international integration,more and more people learn the second language,and people use the second language to communicate more and more frequently.For bilinguals to achieve effective and good communication,language control mechanisms need to continue to play a role.Language control mechanism refers to the process in which bilinguals detect and monitor key features of target language and successfully suppress interference from non-target language during communication^[1].This cumulative training in language control shapes the executive control areas of the brain.Executive control refers to the psychological process in which an individual processes information about the current target from top-down helps people flexibly deal with a large amount of information that changes all the time,and actively and efficiently complete tasks.To explore the specific impact of language control to control the execution,this study attempts to simulate real bilingual communication scene,setting up three language contexts:L1 single context,L2 single context and mixed context.Participants who come from language production group need to name pictures according to the cues,and the participants of comprehension group need to listen carefully,then they finish the Flanker task.Experiment 1 use dual-electroencephalogram to record the simultaneous language switching task and Flanker task of two participants simultaneously.In this task,one participant was fixed for language production,the other for language comprehension,and then the two participants finished the Flanker task simultaneously.The results showed that the L2 single context improved the Flanker task behavior performance,while the production group performed the Flanker task in the mixed context showed bigger N2 effect and smaller P3 effect,and the comprehension group also showed the same ERP trend.Experiment 2 analysis the interbrain synchronization from language production and comprehension.The results suggested that the mixed context showed a higher PLV in simultaneous language switching task.And in Flanker task,there were a higher PLV in congruent trials in mixed context and L2 single context,while in L1 single context the PLV in incongruent trials were higher.The main conclusion of current study as follow:1.Sustaining inhibition control helps to perform similar tasks in executive control;2.Whether bilingual production or comprehension,language control in mixed context is more complex than that in monolingual context.More cognitive resources do not improve behavioral performance but delay behavioral response;3.Language control improves interbrain synchronization,but the synchronization consumes a lot of resources,leading to higher PLV between production and comprehension on simple tasks in Flanker tasks.To sum up,the bilingual production and comprehension have an impact on general executive control due to the differences in language control required by the context.This study provides electrophysiological evidence of high ecological validity for the relationship between language control and executive control in the bilingual domain.