![]() In particular, processing costs may “depend on the frequency of code-switching in the bilingual community” ( Adamou and Shen, 2019: 53). Yet cognitive-neurological consequences of bilingualism, for example, involving executive control, are likely affected by what has been called “the behavioral ecology of bilingual speakers” ( Green, 2011: 1) or “participants’ code-switching habits” ( Hofweber et al., 2016: 648). Studies with university student participant pools tend to privilege relative language proficiency as assessed via formal tests and questionnaires (rather than language use as observed via a sociolinguistically constructed corpus). Yet more generally, findings of bilingual processing costs are increasingly acknowledged to be contingent on study participants, experimental design and language mixing type.įirst, as concerns participants, a crucial factor is linguistic experience with CS, which modulates presumed cognitive costs. One issue is that cost may pertain to cued rather than natural production, as when participants are required to name items (for a review of the language switching experimental paradigm see, e.g., Litcofsky and Van Hell, 2017: 113). Though psycholinguistic studies resting on a range of behavioral and brain imaging measures widely report CS costs, the extent and even applicability of CS cost is controversial. CS strategies are discoverable in speakers’ structural choices, as revealed by distribution patterns in the spontaneous production of CS. We establish prosodic distancing and syntactic selection strategies, capitalizing on CS data by members of a bilingual speech community who regularly use both languages. In this article, the question of cost is refashioned into an investigation of bilingual CS strategies. The notion that CS incurs blanket processing cost, however, is contentious (see Johns et al., 2019: 585–587 for a review). ![]() In (1), for example, the speaker begins the sentence in Spanish, continues in English, and ends in Spanish (In the examples, stretches of speech originally produced in English are italicized in the translation on the right.) CS is generally agreed to be orderly, though debate continues over the rules governing it ( Poplack, 2015: 918). Discovery of community CS strategies may spur reconsideration of processing cost as a matter of relative difficulty, which will depend on bilinguals’ prosodic and syntactic choices at particular CS sites.Ĭode-switching (CS) may be defined as stringing together two languages in alternation. Syntactic selection serves to restore equivalence. This is the more frequent option in bilinguals’ combined experience in both their languages, whereas the English complementizer that is subject to a number of conditioning factors. Here the preference is for the Spanish complementizer que-regardless of main or complement clause language. The syntactic selection strategy is to opt for the variant that is more quantitatively available and more discourse neutral. Prosodic distancing serves to mitigate variable equivalence. Here the complement clause appears in a different prosodic unit from the main clause-disproportionately as compared both with monolingual benchmarks and with bilinguals’ own unilingual English and Spanish. ![]() The prosodic distancing strategy is to separate the juncture of the two languages. A case in point for the English-Spanish language pair is the boundary between main and complement clauses, where a conjunction occurs always in Spanish but variably in English. Such sites of variable equivalence are junctures where the word strings of the two languages are equivalent only sometimes due to language-internal variable structures. CS strategies become apparent by extending the equivalence constraint, which states that bilinguals avoid CS at points of word placement conflict ( Poplack, 1980), to examine points of inconsistent equivalence between the languages, where syntactic difficulty could arise. CS strategies are established by considering prosodic and syntactic variables, capitalizing here on bidirectional multi-word CS, spontaneously produced by members of a bilingual community in northern New Mexico who regularly use both languages ( Torres Cacoullos and Travis, 2018). ![]() The contentious question of bilingual processing cost may be recast as a fresh question of code-switching (CS) strategies -quantitative preferences and structural adjustments for switching at particular junctures of two languages. Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, United States. ![]()
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