Inhibitory control process and lexical robustness in multi-linguals

Abstract

When a picture is viewed by a monolingual speaker, the conceptual representation is fi rst set into motion followed by the associated lexical and phonological representations prior verbalization. This uncomplicated mechanism becomes more complicated for multilingual. This complication is partly resolved by inhibitory control mechanisms. The focus of the earlier studies on inhibitory control function was on bilinguals. Therefore, present study aimed at investigating the language switching performance and lexical robustness using verbal fluency task in multilinguals. Twenty multilingual speakers of Kannada (L1), English (L2) and Hindi (L3) in the age range of 18 to 23 years participated in the study. Reaction time of language switching across the languages and verbal fluency in all the three languages were calculated. The findings suggested an interaction between inhibitory control abilities and language switching capabilities when particularly switching from a more pro cient language to less pro cient language