Comprehension in Codeswitching: Do Complementizers Matter?
Open Access
- Author:
- Stewart, Benjamin Geoffrey
- Area of Honors:
- Spanish
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Paola Eulalia Dussias, Thesis Supervisor
John Lipski, Thesis Honors Advisor
John Lipski, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- codeswitching
bilingualism
verb bias
complementizer
Spanish - Abstract:
- The term “codeswitching” describes a phenomenon in which multilingual speakers “switch” back and forth between two languages varieties within a single conversational context (e.g., Yo tengo hambre, so let’s go get lunch/ I’m hungry, so let’s go get lunch). Some scholars study codeswitching to better understand how the mind juggles two languages at the same time. Studies have shown that there are constraints that restrict the location of a switch, and the constraints that guide codeswitching behavior have been the subject of much ongoing scholarly discussion. In the codeswitching literature, there is a divergence in the findings of studies that have analyzed the grammaticality of Spanish and English complementizers. Some studies have shown that Spanish-English codeswitchers exhibit no preference when producing the complementizer “que" (that) at the point of a codeswitch (e.g., no preference between 'dijo que the boy' vs. 'dijo that the boy'). Other studies, however, show that Spanish-English bilinguals overwhelmingly preferred using 'que' over ‘that’. To date, no study has accounted for this disparity. In the present study, two groups of Spanish-English speakers (codeswitchers living in State College, PA and non-switchers living in Granada, Spain) read sentences while their eye movements were recorded. Two factors were manipulated: one factor was the language of the complementizer (que vs. that) and the other one was verb bias (direct object vs. sentential complement). Results revealed that reading for the codeswitchers was not disrupted when they encountered 'que' or 'that.' The non-codeswitchers found 'that' switches to be more difficult to process than 'que' switches. The results suggest that exposure to codeswitching influences processing.