Abstract
The present study was carried out to investigate whether bidialectals have a similar advantage in domain-general executive function as bilinguals and if so whether the phonetic similarity between two different dialects can modulate the executive function performance in the conflicting-switching task. The results showed that the latencies for switching trials in mixed block (SMs) were longest, non-switching trials in mixed block (NMs) were medium, and non-switching trials in pure block (NPs) were the shortest in the conflict-switching task in all three groups of participants. Importantly, the difference between NPs and NMs varied as a function of phonetic similarity between two dialects with Cantonese-Mandarin bidialectal speakers being the minimum, Beijing-dialect-Mandarin bidialectals medium, and Mandarin native speakers maximum. These results provide strong evidence that there is an advantage in balanced bidialectals’s executive function which is modulated by the phonetic similarity between two dialects suggesting that phonetic similarity plays an important role in domain-general executive function.
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This work was supported by the joint project of “14th Five-Year Plan” for Guangzhou Philosophy and Social Sciences in 2022 (No. 2022GZGJ133), the 13th Five-year Research Plan Project of Guangdong Province in 2020 (Moral Education Special Sciences of Guangdong Province, No. 2020JKDY018), and the Key Laboratory for Social Sciences of Guangdong Province (No. 2015WSY009).
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Conceptualization: Siyi Liu; Methodology: Meifang Zhang, Tianhua Song, Xuebin Wang; Formal analysis and investigation: Lu Wang; Writing-original draft preparation: Siyi Liu, Aitao Lu, Lu Wang; Writing-review and editing: Siyi Liu; Funding acquisition: Aitao Lu, Jijia Zhang; Supervision: Aitao Lu, Jijia Zhang.
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Lu, A., Liu, S., Zhang, J. et al. The Effect of Phonetic Similarity on Domain-General Executive Control in Color-Shape Task: Evidence from Cantonese-Mandarin and Beijing-Dialect-Mandarin Bidialectals. J Psycholinguist Res 52, 1855–1874 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-023-09958-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-023-09958-z