Production in Bilingual and Multilingual Speakers

Abstract

In this chapter, we critically review the most important theories regarding language activation in bilingual production. Thus, we report evidence supporting the view that the language not-in-use is also activated during comprehension and production. Taken together, the evidence suggests that cross-language interactions can be observed from the earlier to the final stages of language production, thus exerting their effects from the lexical to the phonological word levels. Along the chapter we also discuss the mechanism that allows bilinguals to efficiently accomplish naming and translation tasks in the presence of language co-activation. We review the proposal that inhibitory control permits, at least in part, to overcome cross-language interference by suppressing the non-intended language. Finally, we consider different factors that seem to modulate language co-activation and language selection such as immersion in an L2 context and practice in professional translation.