Dear all,

*Dr. Jason Gullifer *(Post-doc, Titone Lab, McGill Psychology) will be speaking in our Cognitive Area Seminar this *Friday, March 24th, 3:30 - 5 PM *(Room S3/4, Stewart Biology Building, 1205 Docteur Penfield Avenue).

*His talk is titled, **"How context of language usage influences bilingual language control."*

For a full abstract, see below the dashed line.

Please join us at this event!

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*How context of language usage influences bilingual language control* Dr. Jason Gullifer, Post-doc, Department of Psychology, McGill University

Knowledge and daily use of a second language are associated with neurocognitive consequences relative to monolingualism. For example, when proficient bilinguals read or speak in one language, they experience coactivation and competition from the unintended language. Neurally, the first and second language have been shown to rely on a shared network distributed across prefrontal, subcortical, and parietal brain areas.

Given that the two languages are generally integrated in function and structure, an open question is how bilinguals manage cross-language influences and ultimately select the intended language from multiple coactivated alternatives. One class of theoretical perspectives (i.e., the lexical account) assumes that coactivation is resolved at the level of the lexicon, while another class (i.e., the cognitive account) assumes that bilinguals exploit more general set of mechanisms to differentiate the two languages, including application executive control abilities and exploitation of relevant social-contextual information.

Here, I present data from two studies on proficient French-English bilinguals. The first study on eye-movements during reading suggests that contextual information drives bilingual lexical access. The second study uses resting state functional connectivity analysis and shows that repeated exposure to particular patterns of language usage influences functional organization of neural networks implicated in bilingual language control. Both findings are compatible with cognitive accounts of lexical selection.