Sarah F. Phillips on "Investigating the Syntactic Processing of Code-switching Expressions"

Sarah F. Phillips (NYU) on "Investigating the Syntactic Processing of Code-switching Expressions" Abstract: We have learned that bilinguals can use code-switching to demonstrate their linguistic knowledge of multiple languages, but we know little about the processing strategies they implement for such mixed-language expressions. Much of what we have learned about syntactic processing in particular comes from a monolingual perspective. During comprehension, we use syntactic, semantic, and contextual information to build and interpret single-language representations (Garnsey et al., 1997; Altmann & Kamide, 1999). I will present magnetoencephalography (MEG) data to suggest bilinguals also use similar strategies for building mixed-language representations. However when confronted with a syntactic ambiguity within a single-language expression, adults will delay in committing to a representation until more information is received (Frazier & Rayner, 1987). I will present preliminary behavioral evidence to suggest that bilinguals will generally delay in committing to a representation when in a dense code-switching context. Taken together, I will argue that bilinguals use similar grammatical information but adapted processing strategies to parse mixed-language input in real-time.