The International Journal of Indian Psychology ISSN 2348-5396 (e) | ISSN: 2349-3429 (p) Volume 3, Issue 3, No. 9, DIP: 18.01.168/20160303 ISBN: 978-1-365-13820-1 http://www.ijip.in | April - June, 2016 © 2016 I K Mishra, H Asthana, I Singh; licensee IJIP. This is an Open Access Research distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any Medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Effect of Language Switching On the Response Latency in the Cued Picture-Naming Paradigm among Hindi Dominant and Balanced Bilinguals Mishra K. A. 1 *, Asthana, H. S. 2 , Singh, I. L. 2 ABSTRACT Language dominance has long been considered an important factor in determining the processing time associated with language switching. It is evident that when an unbalanced bilingual switch from ones non-dominant to dominant language (backward switching), s/he requires more reaction time in comparison to when s/he switches from dominant language to non-dominant language (forward switching). In this study, the researcher examined the effects of language dominance and switching on the response time in the cued picture-naming paradigm. Results indicate that the overall response time required by balanced bilingual is less than that of Hindi dominant bilinguals. It was also found that, Hindi dominant required more reaction time in backward switching in comparison to forward switching. For balanced bilinguals, the difference between forward and backward switching was not found to be significant. The results of this study have been discussed in light of the concept of ‘reactive inhibition’ of the Inhibitory Control Model (ICM). Keywords: Language switching, Language dominance, Inhibitory Control Model (ICM), Response latency. Until recently, the understanding of the representations and the use of a single language was investigated in research. However, due to the increasing multilingual presence everywhere the interest in bilingualism has grown tremendously. Furthermore, the awareness that research on bilingualism provides methods to uncover constraints within the cognitive architecture of bilinguals drew attention to this research field. Consequently, there has been an enormous increase in the activity within this field. The representation of two languages in a bilingual’s mind should make lexical selection more difficult than for monolinguals (French & Jacquet, 2004). General cognitive studies with 1 Ph.D. Scholar, Department of Psychology, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, U.P., India 2 Professor, Department of Psychology, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, U.P., India *Responding Author