Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Numbers and pictures are the two most frequently used types of experimental stimuli in bilingual language control studies. However, the potential qualitative differences in the representation and processing of these stimuli could involve the recruitment of divergent cognitive mechanisms. This paper investigates the influence of stimulus type (numbers vs pictures) on language processing in bilingual comprehension, specifically examining whether semantic connections between numbers impact language switching. We tested Chinese-English-Spanish trilinguals in two cross-modal matching tasks (i.e., a picture-word matching task and a magnitude-number matching task) in the context of the n-2 language switching paradigm. Contrary to the n-2 repetition cost observed in previous studies employing the same paradigm, our findings reveal an n-2 repetition benefit. Crucially, the n-2 repetition effect was observed only with numbers. We discuss the findings in relation to the prevalent language control mechanisms and how lexical associations between numbers may give rise to the observed difference.