Gerontology

Control (management)

Linguistics

Cognitive psychology

Philosophy

Neuroscience

Prefrontal cortex

Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

Language production

Cognition

Anterior cingulate cortex

Magnetoencephalography

Computer science

Sign (mathematics)

Psychology

Mathematics

Code-switching

Disengagement theory

Mathematical analysis

Artificial intelligence

Electroencephalography

Medicine

Word (group theory)

Neuroscience of multilingualism

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Significance Bilingual individuals have the ability to switch between two languages, which requires engaging cognitive control processes to simultaneously “turn off” (disengage) one language and “turn on” (engage) their other language. The unique ability of American Sign Language (ASL)–English bilinguals to simultaneously produce a word and a sign (a code-blend) allows us to unpack these two processes (e.g., switching into a code-blend involves only turning on a language). Magnetoencephalography (MEG) evidence indicates that activating a new language does not recruit brain regions involved in cognitive control, but having to disengage from the previous language does. Additionally, this study reveals that, without motor constraints, simultaneously retrieving two words in different languages is less cognitively effortful than having to inhibit the production of the dominant language.

Language switching decomposed through MEG and evidence from bimodal bilinguals