Non-habitual Code-switching Bilinguals Listen to Switched Speech: Does Switching Direction Effect Comprehension?
Open Access
- Author:
- Gonzalez-Recober, Carmen
- Area of Honors:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Adriana Van Hell, Thesis Supervisor
Jeff M Love, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- code-switching
bilinguals
spanish
psycholinguistics
linguistics - Abstract:
- One of the most distinctive characteristics of bilingual speech is the phenomenon known as code-switching. The inter-sentential and intra-sentential shift between both languages has commonly been observed among Spanish-English bilinguals and studied through psycholinguistic research in the past. However, most of the psycholinguistic research available on code-switching has studied switching between isolated items or has presented sentences visually, neglecting to consider that most code-switching is produced verbally and processed auditorily within full sentences. The present study focuses on comprehension when listening to code-switched speech and compared the comprehension of code-switched sentences that switch from Spanish-English bilinguals’ dominant language (L1 Spanish) to their weaker language (L2 English), or vice versa. Specifically, the study examined the Relative Strength Hypothesis (Meuter & Allport, 1999) and analyzed whether participants’ reaction time to detect a code-switch differed for sentences that switched from the dominant to the weaker language relative to sentences that switched from the weaker to the dominant language. By testing non-habitual code-switchers, this study extended Fernandez, Litcofsky, and Van Hell (2019) who tested habitual code-switchers, thereby exploring the Adaptive Control Hypothesis (Green and Wei, 2014). Results showed that there was a significant difference in code-switching detection times depending on the direction in which the switch occurred. For code-switches from participants L2 English to L1 Spanish, RT was longer than for the switches which occurred from L1 Spanish to L2 English. These findings support Meuter and Allport’s prediction that bilinguals would take less time to react when switches occur from their dominant to weaker language and brought to light the question of how these results would differ if the same task was conducted on a population of habitual code-switchers as well.