Abstract
Studies on event-related potentials (ERP) in code-switching (CS) have concentrated on single-word insertions, usually nouns. However, CS ranges from inserting single words into the main language of discourse to alternating languages for larger segments of a discourse, and can occur at various syntactic positions and with various word classes. This ERP study examined native speakers of Russian who had learned German as a second language; they were asked to listen to sentences with CS from their second language, German, to their first language, Russian. CS included either a whole prepositional phrase or only the lexical head noun of a prepositional phrase. CS at nouns resulted in a late positive complex (LPC), whereas CS at prepositions resulted in a broad early negativity, which was followed by an anterior negativity with a posterior positivity. Only in the last time window (800–1000 ms) did CS at prepositions result in a broad positivity similar to CS at nouns. The differences between both types of CS indicate that they relate to different psycholinguistic processes.
Highlights
Code-switching (CS) is “the use of several languages or dialects in the same conversation or sentence by bilingual people
The results for the early time windows (100–200 ms, 200–500 ms) and the first late time window (500–800 ms) show that the processing of CS at a noun compared with CS at a preposition is different; that is, the effect of CS is modulated by the word class of the switched element
There was no such modulation in the second late time window (800–1000 ms), indicating that there are late processes connected with CS that are independent of word class
Summary
Code-switching (CS) is “the use of several languages or dialects in the same conversation or sentence by bilingual people. Several studies have examined the processing of CS, with some focusing on the brain’s response to CS, as measured with EEG (for overviews cf Kutas et al, 2009; Van Hell et al, 2015, 2018). Most of these studies have considered the processing of the CS of single nouns (among others, Moreno et al, 2002; Liao and Chan, 2016; Ruigendijk et al, 2016) or other meaningful lexical elements (on verbs, see Ng et al, 2014; on adjectives, see van der Meij et al, 2011) as one instantiation of CS. Most studies have found some type of early negativity (e.g., an N400, see below for details) and/or
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