Dr. Yanjing Wu, lecturer from theuniversity of Sheffield, was invited to give a talk “Investigating speechproduction in bilinguals: An example of predictive approaches to neuroscience”to lab members on October 27, 2016. In this lecture, Dr. Wu introduced how heand his collaborators used ERPs and fMRI technologies to explore the bilinguallanguage control topic from the novel perspective of pre-stimulus neuralactivities. Unlike the distributed neural network model of bilingual languagecontrol proposed by Abutalabi and Green in 2007, which did not make adistinction between language control processes and lexical processing stages,they found that bilinguals also exerted inhibition in the preparatory stage,and that the neural mechanism of language preparation was independent from thatof lexical selection. They thus concluded that pre-stimulus neural activitycould predict the language a bilingual would speak, and that the concept of adomain-general cognitive control system need to be reconsidered.  

The lecture was thought-provoking and alllab members were deeply involved. Questions concerning the study itself andsome other academic topics were raised, and everyone was involved in a heateddiscussion.