THE ROLE OF TASK DEMANDS, PROFICIENCY, AND ORTHOGRAPHY IN BILINGUAL LANGUAGE SWITCHING

Abstract

The current study explores language switching in bilinguals and investigates how task demands, proficiency, and orthography contribute to switching costs and patterns between languages. Korean-English bilinguals participated in this study and completed a bilingual naming task in either Hangeul/English or Korean romanization/English, a language-inclusive lexical decision task (also in Hangeul/English or Korean romanization/English), a language background questionnaire, and two proficiency measures: an English cloze test and the English Elicited Imitation Test (EIT).

The bilingual naming task was designed to measure language switching in production, while the lexical decision task assessed switching in comprehension. The task was visually the same, however, participants were asked to name words in one task and recognize words in the other. Participants were assigned to either the Hangeul/English or the Korean romanization/English condition and completed both tasks within their assigned condition. All seventy-five participants included in this study achieved at least 70% accuracy on both tasks. At the time of the study, all were living in an English-speaking country, with Korean as their first language (L1) and English as their second language (L2).

In the naming task under the Hangeul/English condition, switching costs were greater when switching from L2 English to L1 Korean than in the reverse direction. However, in the version of the task with Korean romanization (instead of Hangeul), the pattern was reversed: switching from L1 Korean to L2 English incurred greater costs. In the lexical decision task, switching costs were symmetrical for the Hangeul group but asymmetrical for the romanization group, with greater costs observed when switching from L1 Korean to L2 English. Proficiency, as measured by the EIT, played a significant role in reaction times across most tasks.

These findings are discussed in relation to theoretical models of bilingual language control, with particular attention to how different task demands, orthographic representations, and L2 proficiency modulate switching costs.