Word concreteness modulates bilingual language control during reading comprehension.

Controversies persist in the literature regarding the existence of bilingual language control during comprehension, which may be attributed to overlooking the modulating effect of word concreteness. To test this hypothesis, we conducted an experiment using abstract and concrete words, thereby manipulating the activation level of the nontarget language. Sixty Chinese-English bilinguals were instructed to switch between two languages in word reading tasks. We found that abstract words (e.g., [