CODE-SWITCHING IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS
Open Access
- Author:
- Yarson, Amanda Marie
- Area of Honors:
- Spanish
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Matthew Thomas Carlson, Thesis Supervisor
John Lipski, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Code-switching
Bilinguals
Spanish
English
Social Media
Twitter - Abstract:
- This paper explores how bilingual speakers of Spanish and English read and perceive code-switches in different environments. Code-switching has been stigmatized as being a careless occurrence and a negative representation of one’s language abilities, but in reality, language mixing is a highly systemized, innovative practice that is not random and is governed by the grammars of both languages. Code-switching is commonly found in conversation but is becoming more prevalent on written platforms such as social media. This leads us to ask whether social media is a platform where individuals can mix languages with less stigmatization. In this experiment participants read and rated their perceived naturalness of code-switched texts in either a plain text or a stimulated tweet condition. This was followed by a recall task in which participants indicated if the text had been altered from the original version they read, on the reasoning that participants may not attend closely to where switches occurred, and thus may not recall which language parts of the sentence were in. The comparison of these two conditions was designed to determine what type of an effect an environment like social media might have on code-switching. The results indicate that items read in a Twitter-like environment were overall rated higher in naturalness and that participants were unlikely to notice when a change had occurred. Findings are discussed in terms of factors that may have affected the higher naturalness ratings in the tweet condition and the seemingly nonexistent recognition of changes in the recall task.