Dr. Ivanova, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at El Paso, will present "Bilingual language control, or how bilinguals manage to stick to one language error-free."

ABSTRACT
Bilinguals are mental jugglers, and skilled ones, too: They easily switch languages when they want to but accurately keep to the same language when their other language may not be understood. To avoid saying something in the wrong language by mistake, bilinguals need to engage language control mechanisms (in the most widely accepted view, inhibition of the non-target language: Green, 1998). Understanding language control is necessary to understand the potential sources of the widely-discussed bilingual mental and neural adaptations (aka “the bilingual advantage”), but currently there are a lot of open questions. In this talk, I will examine whether language control mechanisms are specific to bilinguals or are wider-application mechanisms for interference resolution; whether language control is applied only once after a language switch or all the time; and whether it is limited to lexico-semantic information or also functions over structural representations. Finally, I will present work showing for the first time how language control manifests in spontaneous connected speech, and will discuss how such work can help constrain theories of bilingual “mental juggling”.