Reverse cueing effects in L2 production: Another dissociation from conflict tasks

Does L2 production involve adaptive control? Previous research drawing on a parallel between Stroop effects in L1 and cognate effects in L2 produced no support for this idea when inducing adaptive control implicitly (i.e., involuntarily). Reasoning that adaptive control might be hard to implement implicitly in L2 production, here, we induced adaptive control explicitly by presenting informative cues revealing whether the upcoming stimulus would be congruent/incongruent (in L1 Stroop) or cognate/noncognate (in L2 picture naming). Adaptive control was successfully induced in L1 Stroop, with informative cues, relative to uninformative ones, having a facilitatory effect. Such was not the case for L2 picture naming, in which informative cues had an inhibitory effect. While there might be several reasons for this reverse cueing effect, this finding represents another dissociation between L2 production and conflict tasks, which likely has implications for theories assuming a close connection between domain-general and bilingualism-specific control.