Experience with code-switching modulates the use of grammatical gender during sentence processing

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Bilingualism Research

Background:

• Code-switching in bilingual individuals offers insights into language processing.
• Gender marking in Spanish determiners can influence comprehension.
• The visual world paradigm is a key tool for studying real-time language processing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how language experience modulates comprehension in Spanish-English bilingual code-switchers.
• To examine the facilitative effect of gender-marked Spanish determiners on upcoming target nouns.
• To explore the asymmetric gender effect in processing during code-switching.

Main Methods:

• Utilized the visual world paradigm to track eye movements during language comprehension.
• Employed experiments with Spanish-English bilingual code-switchers and a Spanish monolingual control group.
• Designed critical trials involving code-switches from Spanish determiners to English nouns in various sentence structures.

Main Results:

• Bilingual code-switchers exhibited an asymmetric gender effect in processing.
• Facilitation was observed specifically for feminine target items.
• This asymmetric effect extended to Spanish-only contexts, indicating language mode permeability.

Conclusions:

• Language experience significantly modulates comprehension in bilinguals.
• Asymmetric gender effects in processing reflect asymmetric gender use in code-switched speech production.
• The findings underscore the dynamic and permeable nature of language systems in bilingual code-switchers.