The effect of lexical accessibility on Spanish-English intra-sentential codeswitching

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Bilingualism Research
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Bilingual speakers frequently engage in codeswitching, alternating between languages within an utterance.
• Lexical accessibility, the ease of word retrieval and production, is a key factor in language processing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how lexical accessibility influences codeswitching behavior in Spanish-English bilinguals.
• To determine if codeswitching serves to mitigate difficulties arising from cross-language lexical competition.

Main Methods:

• Developed a novel sentence-production paradigm to elicit naturalistic codeswitches in a laboratory setting.
• Predicted codeswitching likelihood based on the relative lexical accessibility of word labels across Spanish and English.
• Analyzed data from a Spanish sentence-production task involving bilingual participants.

Main Results:

• Increased lexical accessibility in English correlated with higher rates of codeswitching.
• Longer speaking durations were observed on trials with codeswitches and even on those without, suggesting underlying processing load.
• Codeswitches were more prevalent when speakers likely faced greater competition from the other language's lexical items.

Conclusions:

• Codeswitching may function as a strategy for bilingual speakers to manage lexical competition between languages.
• Speaker production demands, alongside comprehension patterns, likely contribute to the emergence of codeswitching phenomena in the linguistic environment.