bilingual adults recruited from a US- Mexico border community where ... al salon de clases buscando a la TEACHER ya que necesitaba ayuda con su tarea.
Processing Code-switched Sentences: Effects of Semantic Constraint, Guest Word Phonology and Guest Word Frequency Roberto Heredia and Jyotsna Vaid Texas A&M International University and Texas A&M University
2002 Abstract The present study examined the processing of mixed language sentences in Spanish-English proficient bilingual adults recruited from a US- Mexico border community where code-switching is a common occurrence. In contrast to a previous study involving visually presented language-mixed sentences (Altarriba, Kroll, Sholl & Rayner, 1996), the present study used auditorily presented stimuli. Of particular interest was whether sentence comprehension would be influenced by whether the guest word in a base language sentence is pronounced in the guest language phonology (or code-switched, CS) vs. in the base language phonology (or lexically borrowed, LB). A factorial design was used to examine the relative influence of guest word phonology, guest word frequency (high or low) and level of guest word semantic predictability (high vs. low) on guest word comprehension time (see example below). The following questions were addressed: 1) Will guest word comprehension times be influenced by whether or not guest words are phonetically assimilated into the host language? 2) Will guest word comprehension be sensitive to word frequency, and will frequency effects differ for code-switched vs. borrowed words? 3) Will CS vs. LB word comprehension latencies be differentially affected by level of semantic constraint? 4) How might language dominance influence comprehension speed? Given that participants' dominant language is English, will English words presented in Spanish be comprehended faster than Spanish guest words presented in English sentences? Two studies were conducted. Both involved digitized presentation of an identical set of 64 sentence stimuli containing high or low frequency code-switched vs. borrowed guest language target words (and filler words) embedded in a low or high semantically constrained context. In Exp. 1 the base language was Spanish while in Exp. 2 it was English. The auditory moving-window technique (see Heredia & Stewart, in press) was used and stimulus presentation was controlled by PsyScope. Participants were to press a key upon hearing word phrase segments to advance to the next segment. Per experiment, response times between button presses to words preceding and following the target words were used as an index of target processing time. These were analyzed in a 2 (Target type) X 2 (Constraint level) X 2
(Target frequency) within-subjects analysis of variance. Our findings indicate that, particularly for Spanish base language sentences, guest word comprehension time was affected by guest word phonology, especially for low frequency words. Slower comprehension was observed for low frequency phonologically integrated guest words, particularly in sentences with high semantic constraint. Implications of these findings for models of sentence processing are addressed. Example of High vs. Low Constraint Context: (Target word is in capitals; translation is in italics.) High Constraint Context: Erika entro al salon de clases buscando a la TEACHER ya que necesitaba ayuda con su tarea. Erika went into the classroom looking for the TEACHER because she needed help with her homework. Low Constraint Context: Erika no estaba segura de lo que hacia, y busco a la TEACHER para que le explicara la tarea. Erika did not know what to do, so she went looking for the TEACHER to ask her to explain the assignment.
Abstract of poster presented at annual meeting of CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, 2002
References Altarriba, J., Kroll. J., Sholl. A., & Rayner, K. (1996)). The influence of lexical and conceptual constraints on reading mixed-language sentences: Evidence from eye fixations and naming times. Memory & Cognition, 24(4), 477-492. Heredia, R.R. & Stewart, M. (2002). Online methods in bilingual spoken language research. In R. R. Heredia and J. Altarriba (Eds.), Bilingual sentence processing (pp. 7-30). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
