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Previous research on code-switching has shown that bilinguals’ language experience and cultural identity impact their cognitive control. Bilinguals who are in a more integrated language environment and who alternate between their languages and potentially between their identities are found to exhibit enhanced cognitive control (Beatty-Martinez et al., 2019; Treffers-Daller et al., 2020). However, it is still unclear how these factors interact in bilingual processing. In the present study, we examined how bilinguals’ language experience and bicultural identity impact their cognitive control and code-switching practices. We compared two groups of highly proficient Cantonese-English bilinguals who differ in their language experience: Heritage speakers of Cantonese who were born and raised in the U.S. and speak Cantonese at home, and immersed bilinguals, who were born and raised in a Cantonese-dominant context, but immigrated to the English-dominant environment in the U.S. All bilinguals completed questionnaires on identity, code-switching, and language use, and participated in a comprehension task on code-switching to examine their syntactic processing, a picture-naming task to examine their language switching, and an AX-continuous performance task to assess their cognitive behavior for proactive versus reactive cognitive control. Results from a previous experiment (N=62) suggested that there is interaction between bilinguals’ bicultural identities and cognitive control (Figure 1). Specifically, for bilinguals with harmonious cultural identities, those who have more enhanced proactive cognitive control were also slower in the code-switching task. For bilinguals with conflicting cultural identities, those who have more enhanced proactive control were faster in the code-switching task. Based on the previous results, we suggest that speakers’ individual bicultural identity, but not their language acquisition profile (*heritage* vs. *immersed*), predicts cognitive control. In ongoing research we predict that bilinguals with harmonious cultural identities will exhibit enhanced proactive cognitive control, lower global switch costs, and faster response times to unfamiliar code-switching contexts because of their better regulation of goal-relevant language cues. This study highlights the cognitive benefits of bilingualism by demonstrating diverse competencies of bilingual speakers. It also offers a converging perspective to study bilingualism from an integrated psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approach, allowing us to better understand the sociocultural factors that are at play in bilingual processing.
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