Interactive Alignment and Lexical Triggering of Code-Switching in Bilingual Dialogue.

Gerrit Jan Kootstra,Janet G Van Hell,Ton Dijkstra

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01747

Gerrit Jan Kootstra, Janet G Van Hell + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01747

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Abstract

When bilingual speakers use two languages in the same utterance, this is called code-switching. Previous research indicates that bilinguals’ likelihood to code-switch is enhanced when the utterance to be produced (1) contains a word with a similar form across languages (lexical triggering) and (2) is preceded by a code-switched utterance, for example from a dialogue partner (interactive alignment/priming of code-switching). Both factors have mostly been tested on corpus data and have not yet been studied in combination. In two experiments, we therefore investigated the combined effects of interactive alignment and lexical triggering on code-switching. In Experiment 1, Dutch-English bilinguals described pictures to each other in a dialogue game where a confederate’s code-switching was manipulated. The participants were free to use either Dutch, English, or a combination of Dutch and English in describing the pictures, so they could voluntarily code-switch or not. The pictures contained a cognate [e.g., roos (rose)], a false friend [e.g., rok (skirt, false friend with rock)], or a control word [e.g., jas (coat)]. Participants code-switched more often when the confederate had just code-switched (indicating interactive alignment). They also code-switched more often when cognates were involved, but only when the confederate had just code-switched. This indicates that lexical triggering is driven by interactive alignment. False friends did not enhance the likelihood of code-switching. Experiment 2 used a similar dialogue game with participants from the same population but focused specifically on how to account for interactive alignment of code-switching. Rather than aligning on their dialogue partner’s pragmatic act of code-switching, bilinguals aligned on the language activation from the utterance produced by their dialogue partner. All in all, the results show how co-activation of languages at multiple levels of processing together influence bilinguals’ tendency to code-switch. The findings call for a perspective on bilingual language production in which cross-speaker and cross-language processes are combined.

Highlights

A hallmark of bilingual language production is code-switching, which can be defined as the mixing and merging of two languages into one sentence
We investigated to what extent cognates and false friends could function as triggers for code-switching
In two confederate-scripted dialogue experiments, we investigated to what extent the combination of lexical triggering and interactive alignment affect the likelihood of DutchEnglish bilinguals to code-switch, and how effects of interactive alignment on code-switching can be accounted for

Summary

Introduction

A hallmark of bilingual language production is code-switching, which can be defined as the mixing and merging of two languages into one sentence. Code-switching can be observed in the speech of both low- and high-proficient bilinguals and across many language pairs (see Muysken, 2000; Gardner-Chloros, 2009, for overviews), and shows the remarkable flexibility and adaptability of Alignment and Triggering of Code-Switching how people use language Being such a pervasive phenomenon of bilingual speech, code-switching has inspired bilingualism research in many disciplines, including linguistics (e.g., Poplack, 1980; Muysken, 2000; Myers-Scotton, 2002; Goldrick et al, 2016), sociolinguistics (e.g., Blom and Gumperz, 1972; Myers-Scotton, 1993; Auer, 1998; Tseng and Cashman, 2015; Torres Cacoullos and Travis, 2016), psycholinguistics (e.g., Kootstra et al, 2010, 2012; Hatzidaki et al, 2011; Green and Wei, 2014; Guzzardo Tamargo et al, 2016; Broersma et al, 2019), and neurocognition (e.g., Moreno et al, 2002; Litcofsky and Van Hell, 2017; Liu et al, 2018; Fernandez et al, 2019). Code-switching provides an ideal test bed to study the cognitive mechanisms of bilingual language production at multiple levels of processing

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