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

Abstract

Twitter data from a crisis that impacted many English–Spanish bilinguals show that the direction of codeswitches is associated with the statistically documented tendency of single speakers to prefer one language over another in their tweets, as gleaned from their tweeting history. Further, lexical diversity, a measure of vocabulary richness derived from information-theoretic measures of uncertainty in communication, is greater in proximity to a codeswitch than in productions remote from a switch. The prospects of a role for lexical diversity in characterizing the conditions for a language switch suggest that communicative precision may induce conditions that attenuate constraints against language mixing.

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

“…We emphasize that the identification of bilingual phenotypes is fundamentally a transdisciplinary endeavor. In the last several years, exciting new synergies have emerged between research on bilingualism and other disciplines, such as information theory (Feldman et al 2021;Gullifer and Titone 2020), network science (Tiv et al 2020;Titone and Tiv forthcoming;Xu et al 2021aXu et al , 2021b, and usage-based approaches (Beatty-Martínez et al 2018;Navarro-Torres et al 2021). In this respect, a focus on multi-lab collaborations aimed at leveraging different interactional experiences offers promising prospects for embedding such work in a more comprehensive view of adaptive change (Kroll et al 2018;Leivada et al 2020).…”

“…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.…”

“…Recent findings have shown that for codeswitching bilinguals, the likelihood of switching between languages increases when the word in the other language is more accessible than the equivalent word in the current language (Xu et al 2021a(Xu et al , 2021b, under conditions of greater lexical diversity (Feldman et al 2021), and when words or structures in the other language provide greater discriminatory efficiency (Beatty-Martínez et al 2020a). What this suggests is that codeswitching offers a unique and flexible feature of bilingualism through which resources from both languages are recruited to provide an alternative means to convey a communicative intention, with implications for language control and speech planning.…”

Language contexts induced by the interlocutors’ proficiencies modulate bilingual language monitoring

“…Recent papers have investigated the neural and behavioural consequences enriching the theoretical speculations how information about interlocutors could influence language switching at the lexical level (Feldman et al, 2021;Kaan et al, 2020;Tomić & Kaan, 2022;Vaughan-Evans, 2022). Kaan et al (2020) examined if bilinguals' comprehension of language switching is affected by the language awareness of interlocutors.…”