Description:

Costs and benefits: What corpus studies can tell us about the psycholinguistics of codeswitching

Researchers studying the psycholinguistics of bilingualism generally agree that detailed information concerning the contexts of bilingual language use is paramount for gaining a deeper understanding of bilingual language processing, as well as its potential cognitive consequences: Precisely how do bilinguals use their languages on a day-to-day basis? What does language choice actually look like in spontaneous bilingual conversation, and can the linguistic form of bilingual speech give us any clues regarding the psycholinguistic mechanisms involved in language regulation? In this talk, I present work that combines quantitative analysis of spontaneous bilingual language data with acoustic-phonetic analysis and controlled speech perception experiments to shed light on these questions. I argue that by carefully studying the language switching patterns and phonetic processing of bilingual speech, we gain insight into (1) the time course of cross-language activation during production planning (i.e. the potential costs) and (2) the ability of the comprehension system to exploit a range of phonetic and other informational cues (the potential benefits).