Join the Linguistics Department for Liv Hoversten’s talk “Is Language Control in Comprehension Applied Within or External to the Lexicon?”

Bilinguals need to continually monitor and select the appropriate language(s) for the current context in order to communicate efficiently. Prominent models of bilingual word recognition posit that this selection process, known as language control, occurs externally to the lexicon based on the output of the word recognition system. According to these models, lexical representations from both languages are activated in parallel regardless of task demands or contextual cues that signal the relevance of each language. Only after this cross language activation has unfolded can nontarget language representations be suppressed, via a task/decision module separate from the lexicon.

In this talk, Hoversten will argue instead that task instructions and contextual cues, such as the prevalence of each language, operate directly within the lexicon to modulate the activation strength of lexical representations before and during word recognition. Using data from isolated word recognition and naturalistic sentence processing with eye- tracking and electroencephalography (EEG/ERPs) measures, she shows that the earliest signatures of lexical activation already reflect suppression of representations from the nontarget language. These findings challenge the assumption in models like BIA+ and Multilink that top-down language control is applied only post-lexically, suggesting instead that contextual relevance shapes lexical activation itself. While both languages remain potentially active, she proposes that they are dynamically weighted within the lexicon to restrict cross-language activation early during word recognition.

This event is in-person with an option to join virtually available.

Liv Hoversten is an Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from UC Davis and a B.A. in Chemistry from St. Olaf College. Liv Hoversten’s current work in progress examines the role of parafoveal processing (i.e., the word to the right of the currently fixated word) during reading in native and non-native readers. Her research aims to answer questions about how readers with different linguistic backgrounds extract information from text for successful comprehension.