Proactive language control during bilingual sentence production

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Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: While evidence for proactive languagecontrol processes has been found during single word production, very little, and conflictingevidence has been observed for such control processes during sentence production. So, themain goal of this study was to investigate whether proactive language control can occurduring sentence production.Design/Methodology/Approach: To investigate proactive language control during sentenceproduction, we relied on a description task in single and mixed language blocks.Data and Analysis: Mixing costs and the reversed language dominance effect of languageintrusions and filled pauses were used to examine proactive language control.Findings/Conclusions: Evidence for proactive language control during sentence productioncame from the mixing cost effect observed with both language intrusions and filled pauses.Whereas no reversed language dominance effect was observed in mixed language blocks, asignificant difference in language pattern was observed between single and mixed languageblocks indicating that proactive language control of the first language might be implementedin mixed language blocks during sentence production.Originality: Unlike the vast majority of studies investigating language control, this studyrelied on sentence production instead of single word production. Moreover, to the best of ourknowledge, this is the first study to examine filled pauses to gain insight into languagecontrol.Significance/Implications: These data indicate that proactive language control can beimplemented during bilingual sentence production.