Bilingual Language Control in Phonological Encoding: Evidence from Chinese–English Bilinguals

This study explored language control in phonological encoding during L1 (Chinese) and L2 (English) production via two retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) experiments and two bilingual picture-word interference (PWI) experiments with Chinese-English bilinguals. RIF results showed that performance on a target language phonological judgement task can be facilitated by prior picture naming in either the target language or a non-target language in both L2 and L1 production. Bilingual PWI results revealed cross-language phonological facilitation effects in L2 and L1 production. Domain-general cognitive control only moderated effects in L2 tasks. Findings confirmed non-selective phonological activation of translation equivalents and cross-language phonologically related words and supported the Language-Specific Selection Model as the primary language control mechanism in phonological encoding, which restricts competition to the target language.