Does It Take Effort for Bilingual Speakers to Switch Between Languages? It Depends.
Material below summarizes the article Bilingual Language Switching in the Lab vs. in the Wild: The Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Adaptive Language Control, published on August 16, 2017, in JNeurosci and authored by Esti Blanco-Elorrieta and Liina Pylkkänen.
Research on the neurobiology of bilingualism has suggested that switching languages is inherently effortful, requiring executive control to manage cognitive functions.
However, our study shows that this is only the case when speakers are prompted, or forced, to do so.
In fact, we found that switching languages when conversing with another bilingual individual — a circumstance when switches are typically voluntary — does not require any more executive control than when continuing to speak the same language.
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