Online Comprehension of Community-Specific Code-Switching Norms in Spanish Heritage Speakers
Early Spanish-English bilinguals employ experiential knowledge of the differential production frequencies of code-switching (CS) in their linguistic environment to attenuate switch costs during online comprehension. To this point, such a finding has been attested for CS patterns which hold universally for Spanish-English bilingual communities. Do these bilinguals similarly use community-specific CS production frequencies to guide their online processing of CS? The present study seeks to characterize the utility of regional CS norms in this bilingual group’s online comprehension of switched structures, offering a more precise account of that which drives CS costs.
The distributional production frequencies of some CS structures remain stable between disparate bilingual speech communities, while others are dependent on local production preferences. For instance, Spanish-English code-switchers from the southeastern U.S. favor switching between the auxiliary verb estar and an English present participle (estar + VProg) while categorically rejecting switches between the light verb hacer and an English lexical infinitive (hacer + VInf), in spite of the light verb switch’s syntactic plausibility and attestation in the CS of other Spanish-English communities. In this study, we test early bilinguals from the southeastern U.S. in a reading-while-eye-tracking paradigm to see whether community preferences appear in online processing patterns.
We expect that, like L2 learners, early Spanish-English bilinguals will be sensitive to the distributional production frequencies of CS specific to their bilingual community; however, the time course of said online sensitivity for this group remains uncertain. If processing costs are observed during measures of earlier stage processing, this suggests that active and passive exposure to CS production frequencies have disparate ramifications for online sentence processing; if they are instead observed during later stage processing, then it would seem that processing latencies due to environmental exposure are categorically realized during later, more effortful processing. (Presented at BilForum2024)
Funding Sources: This work is supported by the UF CLAS Scholars Program.