Abstract
As one of the most common language phenomena in bilingual settings, code-switching has been studied widely to explore its nature and features. In the current study, the author set out to explore the effect of syntactic alignment on Chinese-English bilinguals' code-switched sentence production using a picture-describing task with a structural priming paradigm. The structural priming paradigm has been frequently used to explore the mechanisms of sentence production. The effect of syntactic alignment was observed, indicating Chinese-English bilinguals were inclined to produce code-switched sentences with the same syntactic structure between Chinese and English. The findings provide empirical evidence not only supporting structural priming during bilingual code-switched sentence production, but also extending the interactive alignment model (Pickering and Garrod, 2004) to interpret code-switching during bilingual sentence production. Implications for code-switching and bilingual sentence processing are discussed.
Highlights
The findings provide empirical evidence supporting structural priming during bilingual code-switched sentence production, and extending the interactive alignment model (Pickering and Garrod, 2004) to interpret code-switching during bilingual sentence production
Not assuming the inhibition mechanism, the language-specific selection hypothesis (Costa & Santesteban, 2004) postulates that lexical representation of the non-responding language does not enter into competition during lexical selection, the selection mechanism only accesses to target words by lexical representation of the responding language, both of two languages are activated during language production of proficient bilinguals
A main conclusion present here is that there is an effect of syntactic alignment on code-switching between Chinese and English during sentence production, the effect of syntactic alignment facilitates the likelihood for Chinese-English bilinguals to produce code-switched sentence with the same syntactic structure as the priming sentence
Summary
During the past two decades, as one of the most fascinating behaviors of bilinguals, code-switching has been widely investigated according to interdisciplinary approaches, such as grammatical (e.g., Poplack, 1980; MacSwan, 2000; Muysken, 2000; Myers-Scotton, 2002), socio-pragmatic (e.g., Blom & Gumperz, 1972; Li et al, 1992; Myers-Scotton, 1993; Auer, 1998), cognitive (e.g., Meuter & Allport, 1999; Costa & Santesteban, 2004), and neurocognitive (e.g., Paradis, 1997; Abutalebi & Green, 2007; van Hell & Witteman, 2009) (see Isurin et al, 2009 for a review). (IC model, Green, 1998) has been proposed to interpret switching cost during code-switching, suggesting that in line with language tags, inhibition mechanism activates lexical representation of one language while inhibits lexical representation of another language at the same time. Asymmetry of switching cost does not exist (Costa & Santesteban, 2004) Based on this hypothesis, researchers have proposed that the selection mechanism is different between proficient and non-proficient bilinguals. Non-proficient bilinguals use the inhibitory control mechanism during code-switching between proficient and nonproficient languages. This language-specific selection hypothesis successfully explains the equivalent switching cost of two responding languages during code-switching of proficient bilinguals. An understanding of code-switching at sentence-level of language processing seems necessary
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