Translation brain

I've often thought that there's a switch in my brain that I flip when I move from working in English (my birth language) to French (my second language), whether reading, speaking, or even doing technical translations. That switch gets rusty when I spend too much time working monolingually, which is always a risk for someone like me who works at home and doesn't get out nearly as often as I should. The more I practice, the better-lubricated the switch becomes. Here in Montreal, people tend to chat in a fluid mixture of English and French, switching to whichever language they know best for a given point, and it takes considerable practice getting the switch to function smoothly. With practice, following such conversations becomes much easier.

Apparently there's some truth to this. According to Issue 148 (1 September 2009) of the British Psychological Society's Research Digest, "The fact that bilinguals aren't forever spurting out words from the wrong language implies there's some kind of switch."

Of course, as in all things psychological, the details are far more interesting than that. Details of the actual research:
Van Assche E, Duyck W, Hartsuiker RJ, & Diependaele K (2009). Does
Bilingualism Change Native-Language Reading? Cognate Effects in a Sentence
Context. Psychological Science 20(8):923-927.

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