Do you sometimes start a sentence in English y terminas en español?
Mezclas los dos idiomas depending on who you’re talking to, or what you’re talking about?
Psycholinguistic evidence on bilingualism generally suggests that there is a cognitive cost to switching between languages. Yet codeswitching is common in many bilingual communities and does not appear to disrupt language processing. The apparent inconsistency between the experimental evidence and actual bilingual language use is likely in part due to a series of methodological challenges. To address this gap, I designed a novel conversation paradigm to obtain spontaneous speech samples of pairs of bilingual speakers. Using this task, I created a bilingual corpus of over 100 Spanish-English bilingual young adults from four linguistically distinct interactional contexts (San Juan (PR), El Paso (TX), State College (PA), and Granada (Spain)). Comparisons across distinct interactional contexts revealed differences with respect to participants’ codeswitching practices. Specifically, while bilinguals with little exposure to codeswitching rarely alternated between languages during the task, those who came from habitual codeswitching communities produced codeswitched utterances that closely mirrored naturalistic patterns. This research had important implications not only for the study of codeswitching, but more broadly for revealing how speakers may be differentially tuned by their previous linguistic experience.
Collaborators: Giuli Dussias (Penn State University), María del Carmen Parafita Couto (Leiden Univeristy), Christian Navarro-Torres (University of California, Riverside), Emma Bierings (Leiden Univeristy) & Marta Królikowska (Leiden University)
Beatty-Martínez, A. L., Navarro-Torres, C. A., & Dussias, P. E. (2020). Codeswitching: A Bilingual Toolkit for Opportunistic Speech Planning. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1699. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01699
Królikowska, M., Bierings, E., Beatty-Martínez, A L.. Navarro-Torres C. A., Dussias, P. & Parafita Couto, M. C. (2019). Gender-Assignment Strategies within the Bilingual Determiner Phrase: Four Spanish-English Communities Examined. Poster presentation for BHL 2019. Leiden, NL
Beatty-Martínez, A. L. Valdés-Kroff, J. R., & Dussias, P. E., (2018). From the field to the lab: A converging methods approach to the study of codeswitching. In M. Deuchar & D. Kašćelan (Eds.)., Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Code-Switching [Special Issue]. Languages 3(2), 19. doi: 10.3390/languages3020019.
Beatty-Martínez, A.L. & Dussias, P.E. (2017). Bilingual experience shapes language processing: Evidence from codeswitching, Journal of Memory and Language 95, 173-189.