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Two languages, one effect: Structural priming in spontaneous code-switching*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2015

RENA TORRES CACOULLOS  and
CATHERINE E. TRAVIS
RENA TORRES CACOULLOS*
Affiliation:
Penn State University
CATHERINE E. TRAVIS
Affiliation:
The Australian National University
*
Address for correspondence: Rena Torres Cacoullos, Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802, USArena@psu.edu
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Abstract

We investigate here the contribution of code-switching and structural priming to variable expression of the Spanish first person singular subject pronoun in the New Mexican bilingual community. Comparisons with both Spanish and English benchmarks indicate no convergence of Spanish toward English grammar, including in the presence of code-switching, where the linguistic conditioning of variant selection remains unaltered. We find a language-internal and cross-language priming effect, albeit of differing strength, such that speakers’ preceding coreferential (Spanish and English) subject pronouns favor subsequent pronouns, whereas unexpressed subjects tend to be followed by unexpressed subjects. Given the rarity of unexpressed subjects in English, in the presence of code-switching fewer tokens occur with unexpressed primes. Thus, code-switching has no intrinsic effect. Instead, it results in associated shifts in the distribution of contextual features relevant to priming, contrary to the convergence-via-code-switching hypothesis and in accordance with the contextual distribution-via-code-switching hypothesis, which we put forward here.

Keywords

bilingual speechstructural primingvariable subject expressioncode-switchingbilingual contextual distribution hypothesis

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 19 , Special Issue 4: Cross-language Effects in Bilingual Production and Comprehension , August 2016 , pp. 733 - 753
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

The order of authors is alphabetical; both contributed equally to this work, which was made possible by funding from the National Science Foundation (1019112/1019122; http://nmcode-switching.la.psu.edu) and by the NMSEB Corpus teams at the University of New Mexico and the Pennsylvania State University. Thanks to Margaret Deuchar and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on the paper.

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