Abstract
AbstractCode-switching has been found to incur a processing cost in auditory comprehension. However, listeners may have access to anticipatory phonetic cues to code-switches (Piccinini & Garellek, 2014; Fricke et al., 2016), thus mitigating switch cost. We investigated effects of withholding anticipatory phonetic cues on code-switched word recognition by splicing English-to-Mandarin code-switches into unilingual English sentences. In a concept monitoring experiment, Mandarin–English bilinguals took longer to recognize code-switches, suggesting a switch cost. In an eye tracking experiment, the average proportion of all participants' looks to pictures corresponding to sentence-medial code-switches decreased when cues were withheld. Acoustic analysis of stimuli revealed tone-specific pitch contours before English-to-Mandarin code-switches, consistent with previous work on tonal coarticulation. We conclude that withholding anticipatory phonetic cues can negatively affect code-switched recognition: therefore, bilingual listeners use phonetic cues in processing code-switches under normal conditions. We discuss the implications of tonal coarticulation for mechanisms underlying phonetic cues to code-switching.
Highlights
IntroductionFricke, Kroll and Dussias (2016) report subtle shifts in voice onset time (VOT) before an English-to-Spanish code-switch, while Piccinini and Garellek (2014) report subtle shifts in intonation prior to code-switches in either direction
These results suggest that removing anticipatory phonetic cues to a Mandarin code-switch in an English utterance can affect the processing of that code-switch
The main comparison is between the unilingual English unspliced stimuli and the code-switched unspliced stimuli: if the pitch preceding English target words differs from the pitch preceding Mandarin code-switched target words, pitch might be responsible for the differences in perception found in Experiment 2
Summary
Fricke, Kroll and Dussias (2016) report subtle shifts in voice onset time (VOT) before an English-to-Spanish code-switch, while Piccinini and Garellek (2014) report subtle shifts in intonation prior to code-switches in either direction They further found that bilingual listeners use shifts in VOT and intonation as cues to anticipate code-switches. Phonetic cues to upcoming code-switches ( ‘code-switching pronunciation’) may mitigate switch cost This acoustic analysis considers the potential mechanisms for code-switching pronunciation: ‘blending’ of the phonetic features of both languages and ‘preparation’ of articulatory gestures for Experiment 1 Total. If realized via ‘preparation’, there will be targetspecific differences between the pitch preceding English words and the pitch preceding Mandarin words of each tone, such as the mostly dissimilatory tone-specific anticipatory coarticulation found in unilingual Mandarin speech (Xu, 1997). Tonal coarticulation patterns in code-switched utterances might differ, since the English portion of the utterances is unconstrained by lexical tone, whether assuming different contours or similar but more extreme contours
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