5. Limitations
While our study is the initial endeavor to directly investigate diverse
cross-task adaptation patterns across three switching contexts,
acknowledging certain limitations is crucial for future research.
Firstly, participants in the present study were all late-proficient
Chinese-English bilinguals whose reported L2 acquisition occurred after
the age of 6. Previous studies have found that the early bilingual
experiences yield stronger functional connectivity of brain regions
between language and cognitive context, and that this pattern was
associated with higher brain activation efficiency (Berken et al., 2016;
Stein et al., 2014), suggesting that L2 age of acquisition may affect
the efficiency of cross-task adaptation. Secondly, our experiment was
conducted on single-person situations without simulating virtual
companions. However, a recent study by Rafeekh and Mishr (2021) reported
that if a session, in which bilinguals are introduced to a partner with
a differing L2 proficiency level, is added before beginning the
experiment, bilinguals show a lower conflict effect in the flanker task
than in the presence of a balanced bilingual partner, even the partner
only appears on screen and is not required to complete the task with the
participant. These results suggest that the dynamic regulation of the
context mechanism in bilinguals may be influenced by interactions with
interlocutors. Future studies should explore the effect of interpersonal
interactions on cross-task adaptation in interactive contexts.