The Concept of Inhibition in Bilingual Control

To achieve fluent language processing as a bilingual, a dominant theoretical framework assumes that the nontarget language is inhibited. This assumption is based on several empirical effects that are typically explained with inhibitory control. In the current article, we discuss four prominent effects linked to bilingual inhibition in language production (i.e., asymmetrical switch costs, n−2 language repetition costs, reversed language dominance, and the blocked language order effect). We argue that these effects require more empirical examination in order to arrive at a firmer basis for the assumption that inhibition plays a major role during bilingual language control. In particular, the empirical replicability of the phenomena themselves needs to be established more firmly, the underlying theoretical assumptions need further examination, and the alternative explanations of the empirical effects need to be scrutinized. In turn, we conclude that inhibitory control may provide a coherent framework for bilingual language production while outlining the challenges that the inhibition account still needs to face.