As I wrote in a first post on this topic (see here), when I put the finishing touches to some of my posts, I often tell myself that the phenomenon that I have just described remains enigmatic. In this post, I will come back to topics relating to language choice, code-switching and language interferences (also known as transfers). We know a lot about each topic at the linguistic level–each phenomenon has been described extensively–but much less at the cognitive and neurolinguistic levels.
When speaking to monolinguals, or to bilinguals who only know one of their languages, bilinguals are incredibly adept at adopting the right language quickly and efficiently. They also excel at keeping to just that language and closing out the other(s) (see here). If they speak the language fluently and have no accent in it, they may “pass” as monolinguals. More.
See: Psychology Today
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