Codeswitching: A Bilingual Toolkit for Opportunistic Speech Planning.

Anne L Beatty-Martínez,Paola E Dussias,Christian A Navarro-Torres

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01699

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.

Highlights

The study of codeswitching production and bilingual speech more generally has been carried out within separate disciplines, where cognitive psychologists and psycholinguists have primarily centered on exogenously-cued language switching,1 and sociolinguists have focused on the analysis of codeswitching patterns within discourse of members of a given speech community
This finding appears counterintuitive given the ubiquity of codeswitching in many bilingual communities, and begs the question of why bilinguals codeswitch in the first place
While previous research has focused largely on the costs that codeswitching brings to language processing (Guzzardo Tamargo et al, 2016; Adamou and Shen, 2017; Beatty-Martínez and Dussias, 2017; Byers-Heinlein et al, 2017; for reviews see Van Hell et al, 2015, 2018), we consider the possible advantages that codeswitching may offer to language producers during bilingual language interactions

Summary

Introduction

The study of codeswitching production and bilingual speech more generally has been carried out within separate disciplines, where cognitive psychologists and psycholinguists have primarily centered on exogenously-cued language switching,1 and sociolinguists have focused on the analysis of codeswitching patterns within discourse of members of a given speech community. We provide corpus evidence of our own, focusing on complex noun phrases (NPs) in Spanish-English bilinguals who have extensive codeswitching experience, to exemplify how speaker intentions guide production choices in codeswitched speech.

Results

Conclusion