Regulation and Control: What Bimodal Bilingualism Reveals about Learning and Juggling Two Languages

Abstract

In individuals who know more than one language, the languages are always active to some degree. This has consequences for language processing, but bilinguals rarely make mistakes in language selection. A prevailing explanation is that bilingualism is supported by strong cognitive control abilities, developed through long-term practice with managing multiple languages and spilling over into more general executive functions. However, not all bilinguals are the same, and not all contexts for bilingualism provide the same support for control and regulation abilities. This paper reviews research on hearing sign–speech bimodal bilinguals who have a unique ability to use and comprehend their two languages at the same time. We discuss the role of this research in re-examining the role of cognitive control in bilingual language regulation, focusing on how results from bimodal bilingualism research relate to recent findings emphasizing the correlation of control abilities with a bilingual’s contexts of language use. Most bimodal bilingualism research has involved individuals in highly English-dominant language contexts. We offer a critical examination of how existing bimodal bilingualism findings have been interpreted, discuss the value of broadening the scope of this research and identify long-standing questions about bilingualism and L2 learning which might benefit from this perspective.