Code-Switching Strategies: Prosody and Syntax

Abstract

The contentious question of bilingual processing cost may be recast as a fresh question of code-switching (CS) strategies-quantitative preferences and structural adjustments for switching at particular junctures of two languages. CS strategies are established by considering prosodic and syntactic variables, capitalizing here on bidirectional multiword CS, spontaneously produced by members of a bilingual community in northern New Mexico who regularly use both languages (Torres Cacoullos and Travis, 2018). CS strategies become apparent by extending the equivalence constraint, which states that bilinguals avoid CS at points of word placement conflict (Poplack, 1980), to examine points of inconsistent equivalence between the languages, where syntactic difficulty could arise. Such sites of variable equivalence are junctures where the word strings of the two languages are equivalent only sometimes due to language-internal variable structures. A case in point for the English-Spanish language pair is the boundary between main and complement clauses, where a conjunction occurs always in Spanish but variably in English. The prosodic distancing strategy is to separate the juncture of the two languages. Here the complement clause appears in a different prosodic unit from the main clause-disproportionately as compared both with monolingual benchmarks and with bilinguals' own unilingual English and Spanish. Prosodic distancing serves to mitigate variable equivalence. The syntactic selection strategy is to opt for the variant that is more quantitatively available and more discourse neutral. Here the preference is for the Spanish complementizer que-regardless of main or complement clause language. This is the more frequent option in bilinguals' combined experience in both their languages, whereas the English complementizer that is subject to a number of conditioning factors. Syntactic selection serves to restore equivalence. Discovery of community CS strategies may spur reconsideration of processing cost as a matter of relative difficulty, which will depend on bilinguals' prosodic and syntactic choices at particular CS sites.

Errores morfosintácticos en el aprendizaje del inglés como lengua extranjera: El contexto de estudiantes universitarios

“…El proceso cognitivo que guía las construcciones de estudiantes de un idioma destino se puede observar mediante el análisis de la estrategia de superficie (Aziz, Fitriani y Amalina, 2020). Este estudio se enfoca en la taxonomía de estructura superficial de Dulay, Burt y Krashen (1982) Algunos errores interlingüísticos notables son el cambio de código, proceso de usar alternativamente dos idiomas (Torres, 2020), y la interferencia de la lengua materna, impacto de la lengua nativa del alumno en su asimilación del idioma objetivo (Abid, 2016).…”

Lexical Tone as a Cue in Statistical Word Learning from Bilingual Input

“…Answering this question involves not only understanding how learners accommodate 2:1 mappings, but also how between-language cues may affect learning. In a bilingual environment, words from each language are recognized as distinctive units with the help of ample cues, including contextual cues such as a change of interlocutors (Evans, 2011), pauses between transitions (Bhatt, 1997; but see Lyu et al, 2010), or a shift in fundamental frequency (Keating & Kuo, 2012), and more importantly and commonplace, linguistic cues highlighting crosslinguistic differences in phonotactic structures, phonetics, and prosody (Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, 2010;Torres Cacoullos, 2020). Linguistic cues may be a direct, salient, and robust signal of the presence of two languages, which may in turn facilitate statistical learning from multiple language inputs (Weiss et al, 2009;Poepsel & Weiss, 2014).…”

Written and Oral Codeswitching Prevalence: Functions and Didactic Implications in Esl Context

“…Theme 2: Codeswitching for Equivalence According to Cacoullos (2020), one of the functions of student code-switching is equivalence. In this linguistic scenario, students make use of the native equivalent of some lexical items in the target language (L2) and consequently code switches to his/her native tongue.…”