Effective Language Control Strategies Optimize Domain-general Conflict Control: An EEG Study

For bilingual individuals, a notable aspect of their language control lies in its adaptive generalization to domain-general conflict control, known as ‘cross-task adaptation’. However, previous studies have primarily focused on examining adaptation in cue-driven top-down switching, overlooking the existence of three distinct forms of language control: top-down switching, lexical-accessibility-driven bottom-up switching, and voluntary switching that integrates both approaches. This study delved into the adaptation effects of these language control forms in a cohort of 30 unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals, who engaged in the flanker task paired with picture-naming across three distinct switching contexts. Surprisingly, participants exhibited heightened executive control capacity in resolving interference when confronted with the bottom-up switching compared to the top-down and mixed-switching contexts. Notably, Granger causality analysis consistently emphasized that bottom-up switching demonstrated a more robust interaction with conflict control, particularly in the low gamma band (25~35Hz). These findings underscore the remarkable upregulation of the bottom-up switching strategy in contributing to domain-general conflict control. Our study highlights that the effective adoption of switching strategy, rather than the switching itself, yields more significant benefits in cross-task adaptation.