Examining the relationship between comprehension and production processes in code-switched language

Abstract

We employ code-switching (the alternation of two languages in bilingual communication) to test the hypothesis, derived from experience-based models of processing (e.g., Boland, Tanenhaus, Carlson, & Garnsey, 1989; Gennari & MacDonald, 2009), that bilinguals are sensitive to the combinatorial distributional patterns derived from production and that they use this information to guide processing during the comprehension of code-switched sentences. An analysis of spontaneous bilingual speech confirmed the existence of production asymmetries involving two auxiliary + participle phrases in Spanish–English code-switches. A subsequent eye-tracking study with two groups of bilingual code-switchers examined the consequences of the differences in distributional patterns found in the corpus study for comprehension. Participants’ comprehension costs mirrored the production patterns found in the corpus study. Findings are discussed in terms of the constraints that may be responsible for the distributional patterns in code-switching production and are situated within recent proposals of the links between production and comprehension.

Speaking Two Languages for the Price of One

“…During bilingual language production, cost-free language switches have been observed when bilinguals memorized and then repeatedly produced mixed-language sentences with long (1500 ms) and obligatory intervals between every word (Declerck & Philipp, 2015), with long intervals between successive stimuli (3200 ms) affording ample preparation time (Mosca & Clahsen, 2015), when the task that showed cost-free switches was only ever performed in one language (Finkbeiner et al, 2006), or when experimental demands led switching to become the default behavior (Gollan & Ferreira, 2009, Experiment 2). During language comprehension, bilinguals have exhibited cost-free switching when reading written words either silently or aloud (Gullifer, Kroll, & Dussias, 2013; Guzzardo Tamargo, 2012; Ibáñez, Macizo, & Bajo, 2010). …”

Pronouns, Interrogatives, and (Quichua-Media Lengua) Code-Switching: The Eyes Have It

“…When a language switch occurs immediately after one of these tightly language-anchored elements, the longer delay in acknowledgment of a language switch can be taken as a measure of surprisal at the rupture of bonds implicitly regarded as unbreakable, even though a single morphosyntactic system is involved. The acceptability of code-switching combinations has been linked to frequency-based statistical learning (e.g., Guzzardo Tamargo 2012;Guzzardo Tamargo et al 2016;Valdés Kroff et al 2018), and the results of Experiment 1 as well as the previously-reported data on Quichua-Media Lengua bilingualism have shown that both subject pronouns and interrogatives are closely bound to a single language. Thus, upon hearing a subject pronoun or an interrogative, listeners implicitly anticipate a continuation in the same language and evidently take longer to realize that a switch has occurred immediately following the key item.…”

Are all code-switches processed the same? Examining semantic v. language unexpectancy

“…Broadly speaking, much of the early work on code-switching indicates that, just like in task switching (Monsell 2003) and cued-language switching (Meuter and Allport 1999), integrating code-switches in realtime processing leads to greater switch costs relative to unilingual processing (Altarriba, Kroll, Sholl and Rayner 1996;Litcofsky and Van Hell 2017). Nevertheless, recent available literature has revealed that switch costs may be attenuated under certain social or linguistic contexts (Beatty-Martínez and Dussias 2017; Fricke, Kroll and Dussias 2016;Guzzardo Tamargo, Valdés Kroff and Dussias 2016;Valdés Kroff, Guzzardo Tamargo, and Dussias 2018). One plausible account for the discrepancy between the ubiquity of code-switching in bilingual speech and the cognitive costs of its integration in comprehension is due to its unexpectancy in labbased studies.…”