Expecting the unexpected: Code-switching as a facilitatory cue in online sentence processing

Despite its prominent use among bilinguals, psycholinguistic studies reported code-switch processing costs (e.g., Meuter & Allport, 1999). This paradox may partly be due to the focus on the code-switch itself instead of its potential subsequent benefits. Motivated by corpus studies on CS patterns and sociopragmatic functions of CS, we asked whether bilinguals use code-switches as a cue to the lexical characteristics of upcoming speech. We report a visual world study testing whether code-switching facilitates the anticipation of lower-frequency words. Results confirm that US Spanish–English bilinguals (n = 30) use minority (Spanish) to majority (English) language code-switches in real-time language processing as a cue that a less frequent word would ensue, as indexed by increased looks at images representing lower- vs. higher-frequency words in the code-switched condition, prior to the target word onset. These results highlight the need to further integrate sociolinguistic and corpus observations into the experimental study of code-switching

Code-Switching Aids Prediction

Visual world paradigm eye-tracking study on the effect of code-switches on the prediction of words in terms of lexical frequency/unexpectability

Code-switching and emotional reactivity to words

Eye-tracking while reading study on the effects of language context (Spanish, Spanish-English code-switched, English) on Spanish-English bilinguals' processing of emotional words, in terms of emotional valence, arousal, and tabooness

Cross-Linguistic Orthographic Effects in Late Spanish/English Bilinguals

Through the use of the visual world paradigm and eye tracking, we investigate how orthographic–phonological mappings in bilinguals promote interference during spoken language comprehension. Eighteen English-dominant bilinguals and 13 Spanish-dominant bilinguals viewed 4-picture visual displays while listening to Spanish-only auditory sentences (e.g., El detective busca su banco ‘The detective is looking for his bench’) in order to select a target image. Stimuli included two types of trials that represent potential conflict in bilinguals: b-v trials, e.g., banco-vaso ‘bench-glass’, representing homophonous phonemes with distinct graphemic representations in Spanish, and j-h trials, e.g., juego-huevo ‘game-egg’, representing interlingual homophonous phonemes with distinct graphemic representations. Data were collected on accuracy, reaction time (RT), and mean proportion of target fixation. Reaction Time results indicate that Spanish-dominant speakers were slower when the competitor was present in b-v trials, though no effects were observed for English-dominant speakers. Eye-tracking results indicate a lack of competition effects in either set of trials for English-dominant speakers, but lower proportional target fixations for Spanish-dominant speakers in both sets of trials when an orthographic/phonological distractor was present. These results suggest that Spanish-dominant bilinguals may be influenced by the orthographic mappings of their less-dominant L2 English, providing new insight into the nature of the interaction between the orthography and phonology in bilingual speakers

Code Switching in the presence of others

ERP study, looking whether the processing of code-switching (frontal positivity, LPC) is affected by the presence of a monolingual or bilingua

Attention to and Memory of Information in Remote Story Listening

Attention is the cognitive system that enables people to successfully maintain focus, orient to sensory input, and gather information over time (Posner & Petersen, 1990). In prior in-person mind-wandering studies, participants have responded to probes about their attentional state and indicated that they were on-task and undistracted only about 60% of the time during language comprehension and simple decision-making tasks. The rest of the time, participants reported having split attention or being off-task. When listeners hear stories and are periodically probed for whether they were paying attention, greater reports of zoning out predict reliably lower recall of critical information (Boudewyn & Carter, 2018; Smallwood et al., 2008a; Smallwood et al., 2008b). In this study, we attempt to characterize such fluctuations in attention and their effect on information recall in a remote, online context. Participants will listen to two Sherlock Holmes stories, responding periodically to attention probes as they listen. After each story, they will answer comprehension questions testing their recall of information from the story. This project addresses the questions: How do self-reports of attention levels in our online study compare to prior in-person studies? In a remote online context, is attention to information predictive of later memory for that information

Attention and Bilingual Code-switching

Attention is the cognitive system that enables people to successfully maintain focus, orient to sensory input, and gather information over time (Posner & Petersen, 1990). Attention is critical to successful language processing: When attention lapses, people fail to encode or retain key information (Boudewyn & Carter, 2018). In this study we are investigating if attention is modulated when a bilingual listener hears a code-switch—a switch from one language to another mid-utterance. The project addresses the questions: Does encountering code-switches increase attention? And, is information presented in a code-switched context remembered better than information presented in a single-language context? Past research suggests that being in a dual language context or comprehending a code-switch can improve people’s performance on a subsequent task by helping them ignore distractions (Adler et al., 2020; Wu & Thierry, 2013). Here, we ask whether these past reports of benefits from mixed language contexts on a millisecond timescale extends to benefits in attention and memory more broadly on a larger timescale. We first conducted an English-only validation study with English monolinguals to ensure the story listening and attention probe method worked as expected in a remote online experiment. The OSF project (pre-registration, materials, and data) for that initial English-only validation study can be found here: https://osf.io/g92at/ The project on this OSF page involves two experiments: -Experiment 1: Spanish-English bilinguals listened to two stories--one with code-switches and one in a single-language (English only). This was pre-registered. -Experiment 2: English monolinguals listened to two stories--one with code-switches and one in a single-language (English only)

Processing Code-Switches in the Presence of Others: An ERP Study

Code-switching is highly socially constrained. For instance, code-switching is only felicitous when those present are fluent in both languages. This means that bilinguals need to dynamically adjust their language control and expectation of code-switching to the current social situation or context. The aim of the present EEG study was to investigate how and when language control in the comprehension of code-switches is affected by the assumed language knowledge of others in the context. Spanish-English bilinguals read sentences with and without code-switches together with another Spanish-English bilingual or with an English monolingual. Switches elicited an early fronto-central positivity. This effect was smaller overall when a bilingual was present at the start of the study. In addition, the late positive complex found for switches was smaller when a bilingual was present rather than a monolingual, but only for those participants who were sensitive to the other’s language knowledge in their off-line judgments. These findings suggest that the bilinguals in our study expected and activated both languages when initially paired with a bilingual and that they more easily accommodated code-switches, in the presence of a bilingual than in the presence of a monolingual. Our findings support the view that language control can be modulated by the perceived language knowledge of others present, and are compatible with a dynamic control model of bilingual language comprehension