Description:

Local social meanings and language use in a Chicago bilingual community

Social context shapes bilinguals’ language use, influencing their expectations for which language(s) are contextually appropriate. Bilinguals dynamically adapt their language use to accord with these socially derived expectations, with different interactional contexts believed to exert different demands on bilinguals’ language control mechanisms. While seminal theories of bilingual language control postulate that social context modulates the activation levels of a bilingual’s languages, they do not determine which aspects of context are relevant to these processes (e.g., Green & Abutalebi, 2013; Grosjean, 2001). In this talk, I present results from two linked studies that examine how local social meanings shape language selection and control in bilinguals. In the first study, semi-structured interviews with Mexican American, Spanish-English bilinguals from Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood were used to identify the social meanings that bilinguals believed guided their expectations for which language(s) were needed in an interaction. Drawing on insights from these interviews, the second study employed a socially primed phoneme categorization task to test the influence of local, community-grounded social factors on bilinguals’ speech perception. I argue that, together, findings from these studies underscore the important role that local social context plays in shaping bilingual language use, providing valuable insight into what local social meanings bilinguals themselves believe to guide their language use as well as how those meanings are integrated into bilingual language processing and control.