In this paradigm, participants name pictures in the appropriate language according to a language cue (e.g., a red frame for L1, and a blue frame for L2). Using the language switching paradigm, numerous studies provided evidence supporting ICM (e.g., Meuter and Allport, 1999 Ma et al., 2016 Declerck et al., 2017). Furthermore, ICM claims an enhanced inhibition over the language of greater activation, which is usually the dominant L1 for unbalanced bilinguals. For a specific lexical item of the target language, bilinguals also need to exert inhibition over the interference from its translation equivalent at the local level. By virtue of the tags, bilinguals can globally exert inhibition over the lexical items of the entire language system that are unwanted in a certain situation. Each lexical item has an associated tag either for L1 or for L2. When bilinguals intent to speak in their first language (L1) or second language (L2), lexical items from both languages are activated in parallel ( Green, 1998 Meuter and Allport, 1999 Liu et al., 2020), interfering and competing with each other ( Hermans et al., 1998 Green and Abutalebi, 2013). In the field of bilingualism, one of the important and unsettled issues is the relationship between language control and domain-general cognitive control (hereafter, referred to as cognitive control), which is the ability to regulate their behaviors by internal goals ( Miller, 2000 Braver, 2012).Īccording to ICM ( Green, 1998), bilinguals produce the target language by controlling the interference from the non-target language (specifically, inhibit it). To achieve this, highly efficient mechanisms of bilingual language control (hereafter, referred to as language control) are needed for bilinguals according to the prevailing theories. Bilinguals seem effortless to juggle two languages in their minds. Globally, more than half of the population is bilingual, across all age groups, all social classes, and most countries ( Grosjean, 2013). Learning and using two or more languages is increasingly common in modern society. Language is the most essential and effective tool of communication and thinking for human beings. This may imply a shift from local to global for the dependency of bilingual language control on domain-general cognitive control during the L2 development of bilinguals. These results verify the moderating effect of L2 proficiency on the relationship between bilingual language control and domain-general cognitive control, that is, bilinguals with more proficient L2 rely on domain-general cognitive control less for local language control and more for global language control. Furthermore, Simon scores positively predicted mixing costs in bilinguals with high L2 proficiency, but not in bilinguals with low L2 proficiency. We find that Simon scores positively predicted switching costs in bilinguals with low L2 proficiency, but not in bilinguals with high L2 proficiency. To examine this hypothesis, we recruited 36 unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals to perform the Simon task (to assess domain-general cognitive control), Oxford Placement Test (to assess L2 proficiency), and picture naming tasks in single-and dual-language contexts (to evoke local and global language control). These contradictory conclusions are possibly due to the neglect of the moderating effect of second language (L2) proficiency, that is, the relationship between bilingual language control and domain-general cognitive control might vary with the L2 proficiency of bilinguals. Previous studies mostly examined the correlation between performances of bilinguals in language control tasks and that in domain-general cognitive control tasks and came to the conclusions that they overlap, partially overlap, or are qualitatively different. The relationship between bilingual language control and domain-general cognitive control has been a hot topic in the research field of bilingualism. 3Tianjin Social Science Laboratory of Students’ Mental Development and Learning, Tianjin, China.

2Faculty of Psychology, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China.

1Key Research Base of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education, Tianjin Normal University, Academy of Psychology and Behavior, Tianjin, China.

Qiping Wang 1,2, Xinye Wu 1,2, Yannan Ji 1,2, Guoli Yan 1,2,3 and Junjie Wu 1,2,3*

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