Effective Language Control Strategies Optimize Domain-general Conflict
Control: An EEG Study
Abstract
For bilingual individuals, a notable aspect of their language control
lies in its adaptive generalization to domain-general conflict control,
known as ‘cross-task adaptation’. However, previous studies have
primarily focused on examining adaptation in cue-driven top-down
switching, overlooking the existence of three distinct forms of language
control: top-down switching, lexical-accessibility-driven bottom-up
switching, and voluntary switching that integrates both approaches. This
study delved into the adaptation effects of these language control forms
in a cohort of 30 unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals, who engaged in
the flanker task paired with picture-naming across three distinct
switching contexts. Surprisingly, participants exhibited heightened
executive control capacity in resolving interference when confronted
with the bottom-up switching compared to the top-down and
mixed-switching contexts. Notably, Granger causality analysis
consistently emphasized that bottom-up switching demonstrated a more
robust interaction with conflict control, particularly in the low gamma
band (25~35Hz). These findings underscore the remarkable
upregulation of the bottom-up switching strategy in contributing to
domain-general conflict control. Our study highlights that the effective
adoption of switching strategy, rather than the switching itself, yields
more significant benefits in cross-task adaptation.