Cost or advantage? Intra-sentential language switching could facilitate L2 emotional words' comprehension in auditory modality

Language switching is encountered commonly and inevitably in bilingual society and often induces costs for target language's production. However, for auditory words' comprehension at sentence level, the limited research showed divergent findings. Some research observed comprehension costs when the language of target words was switched with the code of sentential contexts kept constant; but a potential switch advantage was also showed in non-dominant targets' processing when sentential context switches occurred. Additionally, it's well documented that the words' emotional connotations play a key role in both L1 and L2 word comprehension. Therefore, we aimed to explore which switch effect would occur when bilinguals comprehended L1/L2 emotional target nouns in auditory modality at behavioral and neural level through a visual object selection task. Behaviorally, switch related costs occurred in L1 targets' comprehension, whereas advantage effects were found in L2. Moreover, greater switch advantage occurred for positive and negative targets than for neutral ones. Consistently, larger LPC (Late Positive Component) defection was elicited for L2-Switch trials relative to L2-Nonswitch trials and the differences of LPC's amplitude could predict the behavioral advantageous effects of switching in nondominant targets' comprehension, which suggest that language switching lead to deeper re-analyses for emotional words. Taken together, it's suggested that bilinguals can adaptively utilize top-down (sentential prediction) and bottom-up (words' emotional information) cues to access weaker L2 representations. •A switch advantage occurs in L2 targets when language switch happens in sentence contexts.•Positive and negative targets showed greater switch advantage than neutral ones.•Bilinguals can adaptively utilize top-down and bottom-up information to access weaker L2 representations.