Abstract
This study examines the processing of two putatively problematic intra-sentential code-switching configurations, following subject pronouns and interrogatives, in a bilingual speech community in which there are no confounding grammatical differences. The languages are Ecuadoran Quichua and the mixed language known as Media Lengua, consisting of the entire Quichua morphosyntactic system but with all lexical roots replaced by their Spanish counterparts. In eye-tracking processing experiments utilizing the visual world paradigm with auditorily presented stimuli, Quichua–Media Lengua bilinguals identified the languages more quickly after pronouns and interrogatives than after lexical items, while acknowledgement of code-switches after pronouns and interrogatives was delayed in comparison with switches following lexical items. The facilitation effect of pronouns and interrogatives evidently provokes a surprise reaction when they are immediately followed by items from another language, and this relative delay may play a role in the low acceptability of code-switched utterances that otherwise violate no grammatical constraints.
Highlights
Many bilingual speakers switch between their languages during informal speech with interlocutors who share the same languages
Noticeable is the fact that the critical times in the switching task are the mirror image of those stemming from the language-identification experiment: acknowledgement of an intra-sentential switch took the longest when the switch occurred after an interrogative element or subject pronoun and was considerably quicker when the switch occurred after an open-class lexical item
The acceptability of code-switching combinations has been linked to frequency-based statistical learning (e.g., Guzzardo Tamargo 2012; Guzzardo Tamargo et al 2016; Valdés Kroff et al 2018), and the results of Experiment 1 as well as the previously-reported data on Quichua-Media Lengua bilingualism have shown that both subject pronouns and interrogatives are closely bound to a single language
Summary
Many bilingual speakers switch between their languages during informal speech with interlocutors who share the same languages. When bilingual code-switching takes place smoothly and without hesitation within the bounds of a single utterance, it is challenging to linguistic and psychological models grounded in a single language, because more than two monolingual grammars are involved (Grosjean 1989) Such intra-sentential code-switching may appear chaotic and unconstrained to outsiders, but a large body of research on numerous bilingual dyads—frequently confirmed by naïve speakers’ intuitions—has shown that most intra-sentential switches do not violate the grammatical structures of either language, within the single-language segments and at the points of transitions between languages (e.g., Poplack 1980; Lipski 1977, 1978, 1985; Muysken 2000). Most bilingual speakers without training in linguistics do not have explicit knowledge of these general constraints, corpora of bilingual interactions reveal few violations in production, and a variety of interactive tasks such as acceptability judgments and elicited repetition have confirmed the robustness of general restrictions on the processing of intra-sentential language mixing, all circumscribed by the aforementioned “do no harm” admonitions (no grammatical violations in either language).
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