Codeswitching: A Bilingual Toolkit for Opportunistic Speech Planning

Abstract

The ability to engage in fluent codeswitching is a hallmark of the flexibility and creativity of bilingual language use. Recent discoveries have changed the way we think about codeswitching and its implications for language processing and language control. One is that codeswitching is not haphazard, but subject to unique linguistic and cognitive constraints. Another is that not all bilinguals codeswitch, but those who do, exhibit usage patterns conforming to community-based norms. However, less is known about the cognitive processes that regulate and promote the likelihood of codeswitched speech. We review recent empirical studies and provide corpus evidence that highlight how codeswitching serves as an opportunistic strategy for optimizing performance in cooperative communication. From this perspective, codeswitching is part and parcel of a toolkit available to bilingual codeswitching speakers to assist in language production by allowing both languages to remain active and accessible, and therefore providing an alternative means to convey meaning, with implications for bilingual speech planning and language control more generally.

The Quest for Signals in Noise: Leveraging Experiential Variation to Identify Bilingual Phenotypes

“…Quantitative analysis of these data has revealed the systematicity underlying codeswitching tendencies by exemplifying bilinguals' adherence to community norms over idiosyncratic behaviors (Poplack 1980(Poplack , 1987Poplack and Meechan 1998;Travis 2015, 2018). We have come to see that codeswitching is not random between-language interference but rather serves as an opportunistic strategy 5 that provides communicative precision (Beatty-Martínez et al 2020a;Feldman et al 2021;Xu et al 2021aXu et al , 2021b.…”

Insights into codeswitching from online communication: Effects of language preference and conditions arising from vocabulary richness

“…Codeswitching can be cognitively demanding, and costs can vary with immediacy of the switch (Gullifer & Titone, 2019). Others have suggested that its cost may be offset by optimizing another aspect of communication (Beatty-Martínez et al, 2020). For example, reduced lexical diversity, like other variants of style matching (Abney, Paxton, Dale & Kello, 2014), can be a marker of better cooperation among speakers (Feldman et al, 2017).…”

“…With respect to conditions associated with a codeswitch, we ask whether lexical diversity for English before a codeswitch out of English (and into Spanish) and after a codeswitch (from Spanish) into English is greater than in tweets remote (± 10 tweets) from a codeswitch. Differentiated word usage would suggest that communicative precision at a codeswitch as indexed by vocabulary richness creates an opportunity that attenuates constraints against mixing languages (Beatty-Martínez, Navarro-Torres & Dussias, 2020).…”

Evidence for executive function advantages in low SES bilingual children. But why do they arise? A commentary on Grote, Scott and Gilger (2021)

“…In terms of the EF tasks used, Grote et al’.s study (2021) provides a promising methodological framework for assessing EFs in bilingual children, which, if combined with measurements of language usage patterns, could reveal insights into the causes of bilingualism effects on EF development. The Adaptive Control Hypothesis suggests that one of the key factors influencing EFs in bilinguals is code-switching, that is, the common bilingual practice of switching between languages within the same utterance or conversation to optimise communication in bilingual contexts (Beatty-Martínez et al, 2020; Green & Abutalebi, 2013). Indeed, there is growing evidence that code-switching in adult bilinguals modulates EFs (Hofweber et al, 2020; Lai & O’Brien, 2020; Verreyt et al, 2016; Yang et al, 2016) and divergent thinking (Kharkhurin & Wei, 2015), although counter-examples and null-results co-exist (Paap et al, 2017).…”