Language control in bilinguals is often investigated with the language switching paradigm. Switch costs reflect the ease/difficulty of applying this control mechanism. The type of stimuli employed in the experiments may influence switch costs. To date, only one study has compared digit vs picture processing, reporting reduced switch costs for digits (Declerck, Koch & Philipp, 2012). This result was adjudicated to phonological overlap between the languages used. Crucially, it remains an open question whether this digit effect generalises to language combinations without phonological relation. We fill this gap by investigating language switching with two language pairs differing in relative proficiency (L1 Chinese–L2 English, L1 Chinese–L3 French), where cross-language phonological activation is not expected. Overall, a digit effect is observed in the Chinese–English pair. Contrary to Declerck et al.'s (2012) finding, digits increased switch costs. Phonological mediation cannot explain this effect; instead, we suggest its origin lies in within-language word association links.

双语者的语言控制通常用语言转换范式进行研究。转换成本反映了应用此控制机制的难易程度。实验中使用的刺激类型可能会影响转换成本。迄今为止，只有一项研究比较了数字处理与图片处理，报告了数字转换成本的降低（Declerck、Koch 和 Philipp，2012 年）。这一结果被裁定为所用语言之间的语音重叠。至关重要的是，这种数字效应是否推广到没有语音关系的语言组合仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。我们通过研究两种相对熟练程度不同的语言对（L1 Chinese-L2 English，L1 Chinese-L3 French）的语言转换来填补这一空白，其中跨语言的语音激活是不期望的。全面的，在汉英对中观察到数字效应。与 Declerck 等人 (2012) 的发现相反，数字增加了转换成本。语音调解无法解释这种影响；相反，我们认为它的起源在于语言内的单词关联链接。