Expecting the unexpected: Code-switching as a facilitatory cue in online sentence processing

Aleksandra Tomić,Jorge R Valdés Kroff

doi:10.1017/s1366728921000237

Abstract

AbstractDespite its prominent use among bilinguals, psycholinguistic studies reported code-switch processing costs (e.g., Meuter & Allport, 1999). This paradox may partly be due to the focus on the code-switch itself instead of its potential subsequent benefits. Motivated by corpus studies on CS patterns and sociopragmatic functions of CS, we asked whether bilinguals use code-switches as a cue to the lexical characteristics of upcoming speech. We report a visual world study testing whether code-switching facilitates the anticipation of lower-frequency words. Results confirm that US Spanish–English bilinguals (n = 30) use minority (Spanish) to majority (English) language code-switches in real-time language processing as a cue that a less frequent word would ensue, as indexed by increased looks at images representing lower- vs. higher-frequency words in the code-switched condition, prior to the target word onset. These results highlight the need to further integrate sociolinguistic and corpus observations into the experimental study of code-switching.

Highlights

Code-switching (CS), or the use of several codes in the same conversation (Gardner-Chloros, 2009), is one of the hallmarks of bilingualism
The results corroborate our hypothesis that CS plays a role in signaling upcoming unexpected information, even in our simple operationalization of unexpectancy as lexical frequency and in the neutral sentential contexts that participants heard. This hypothesis was driven by the distribution of code-switches in bilingual discourse, which suggests that code-switches have a role in information distribution (Myslín & Levy, 2015), such that more informative speech occurs after/on the switch from the less to more salient language, which we operationalized in the context of bilingual speakers in the US as the switch from the minority language (i.e., Spanish) into the majority language (i.e., English)
We have argued that the English to Spanish switch direction is the sociolinguistically less-preferred switch direction found in the Spanish–English bilingual community under study (Beatty-Martínez & Dussias, 2017; Blokzijl et al, 2017; Valdés Kroff, 2016)

Summary

Introduction

Code-switching (CS), or the use of several codes in the same conversation (Gardner-Chloros, 2009), is one of the hallmarks of bilingualism. Experimental research on bilingual language control has capitalized on the use of cued language switching tasks (e.g., Meuter & Allport, 1999; Costa & Santesteban, 2004; Gollan & Ferreira, 2009) These tasks are primarily focused on production, often lack sentential context, or include language switches that are not representative of the discoursesupported code-switches found in bilingual speech (e.g., Schotter, Li & Gollan, 2019). The goal of these studies is to test the limits of bilingual language control in terms of switch costs, mixing costs, and their relationship to domain-general cognitive processes such as inhibition or increased attention. The Czech–English code-switch direction was chosen as it was predominant in the corpus overall, regardless of the language dominance of the speakers (601 Czech–English vs. 24 English–Czech code-switches [Myslín & Levy, 2015])

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion