Cover not available
Part of
Code-switching – Experimental Answers to Theoretical Questions: In honor of Kay González-Vilbazo
Edited by Luis López
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 19] 2018
► pp. 147–176

Modality in experimental code-switching research

Aural versus written stimuli

| The University of Alabama
| University of Illinois at Chicago

Various methodological concerns are specific to code-switching research; however, the modality of experimental stimuli has yet to be thoroughly investigated. This study explicitly tests if the mode of presentation does in fact affect participants’ judgments in Spanish-English code-switching using two different syntactic phenomena: (i) pronouns and lexical DPs, and (ii) wh-movement. The results are parallel, but not identical for the two modalities. We found no difference on a global level, indicating that written code-switched stimuli do not produce depressed ratings. We found a few individual differences when looking at specific structures within the two phenomena. In those cases, the aural condition enhanced the ratings of more acceptable sentences. Crucially, these differences did not affect the interpretation of the results.

Keywords: code-switching, methodology, modality, syntax, pronouns, wh-movement, Spanish, English
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Written code-switching
    • 2.2The sounds of code-switching
    • 2.3Implications for code-switching research
    • 2.4Research questions and hypotheses
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Experimental procedure
    • 3.3Experimental stimuli
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.19.06kor
References
Barbosa, P.
(2001) On inversion in wh-questions in Romance. In A. Hulk & J. -Y. Pollock (Eds.), Subject inversion in Romance and the theory of universal grammar (pp.20–59). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bartlett, L., & González-Vilbazo, K.
(2010) Classifiers in Spanish-Taiwanese code-switching. Proceedings from the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (Vol. 46, pp.1–15). Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Bentahila, A., & Davies, E. E.
(1983) The syntax of Arabic-French code-switching. Lingua, 59, 301–330. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Callahan, L.
(2004) Spanish/English codeswitching in a written corpus. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ebert, S.
(2014) The morphosyntax of wh-questions: Evidence from Spanish-English code-switching (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). The University of Illinois at Chicago.Google Scholar
Eleta, I., & Golbeck, J.
(2014) Multilingual use of Twitter: Social networks at the language frontier. Computers in Human Behavior, 41, 424–432. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gardner-Chloros, P., & Edwards, M.
(2004) Assumptions behind grammatical approaches to code-switching: When the blueprint is a red herring. Transactions of the Philological Society, 102, 103–129. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
González-Vilbazo, K.
(2005) Die Syntax des Code-Switching: Esplugisch – Sprachwechsel an der Deutschen Schule Barcelona [The syntax of code-switching: Esplugisch – Code-switching at the German School of Barcelona] (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Cologne.Google Scholar
González-Vilbazo, K., Bartlett, L., Downey, S., Ebert, S., Heil, J., Hoot, B., … Ramos S. E.
(2013) Methodological considerations in code-switching research. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 6, 119–138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
González-Vilbazo, K., & Koronkiewicz, B.
(2016) Tú yo can codeswitch, nosotros cannot: Pronouns in Spanish-English codeswitching. In R. E. Guzzardo Tamargo, C. M. Mazak, & M. C. Parafita Couto (Eds.), Spanish-English codeswitching in the Caribbean and the US (pp.237–260). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
González-Vilbazo, K., & López, L.
(2011) Some properties of light verbs in code-switching. Lingua, 121, 832–850. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2012) Little v and parametric variation. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 30, 33–77. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goodall, G.
(2001) The EPP in Spanish. In W. D. Davies & S. Dubinsky (Eds.), Objects and other subjects (pp.193–223). Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grosjean, F.
(1982) Life with two languages: An introduction to bilingualism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
(1998) Studying bilinguals: Methodological and conceptual issues. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1, 131–149.Google Scholar
Gumperz, J. J.
(1982) Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gutiérrez-Bravo, R.
(2008) Topicalization and preverbal subjects in Spanish wh-interrogatives. In J. Bruhn de Garavito & E. Valenzuela (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 10th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (pp.225–236). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Kitagawa, Y., & Fodor, J. D.
(2003) Default prosody explains neglected syntactic analyses of Japanese. In W. McClure (Ed.), Japanese/Korean Linguistics (Vol. 12, pp.267–279). Stanford, CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
(2006) Prosodic influence on syntactic judgments. In G. Fanselow, C. Féry, R. Vogel, & M. Schlesewsky (Eds.), Gradience in grammar (pp.336–358). Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koronkiewicz, B.
(2014) Pronoun categorization: Evidence from Spanish-English code-switching (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). The University of Illinois at Chicago.Google Scholar
Lipski, J.
(1978) Code-switching and the problem of bilingual competence. In M. Paradis (Ed.), Aspects of bilingualism (pp.250–264). Columbia, SC: Hornbeam Press.Google Scholar
MacSwan, J.
(2000) The architecture of the bilingual language faculty: Evidence from intrasentential codeswitching. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 3, 37–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
MacSwan, J., & Colina, S.
(2014) Some consequences of language design: Codeswitching and the PF interface. In J. MacSwan (Ed.), Grammatical theory and bilingual codeswitching (pp.185–210). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Mahootian, S.
(2005) Linguistic change and social meaning: Codeswitching in the media. International Journal of Bilingualism, 9, 361–375. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McCloskey, J.
(2006) Questions and questioning in a local English. In R. Zanuttini, H. Campos, E. Herburger, & P. H. Portner (Eds.), Crosslinguistic research in syntax and semantics: Negation, tense, and clausal architecture (pp.87–126). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Milroy, L., & Muysken, P.
(Eds.) (1995) One speaker, two languages: Cross-disciplinary perspectives on code-switching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Montes-Alcalá, C.
(2001) Written codeswitching: Powerful bilingual images. In R. Jacobson (Ed.), Code-switching worldwide (Vol. 2, pp.59–74). Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Montrul, S., & Slabakova, R.
(2003) Competence similarities between native and near-native speakers: An investigation of the preterite/imperfect contrast in Spanish. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25, 351–398. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
O’Neill, R., Cornelius, E. T., & Washburn, G. N.
(1981) American Kernal lessons: Advanced student’s book. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Poplack, S.
(1980) Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en espanol: Toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics, 18, 581–618. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Riley, J.
(2015) Bilingual Facebook Users’ Cognitive Writing Processes/Processus cognitifs d’écriture des utilisateurs bilingues de Facebook. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology/La Revue Canadienne de L’Apprentissage et de la Technologie, 41(1), 1–17.Google Scholar
Schütze, C. T.
(1996) The empirical base of linguistics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Sebba, M.
(2012) Multilingualism in written discourse: An approach to the analysis of multilingual texts. International Journal of Bilingualism, 17, 97–118. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Timm, L. A.
(1975) Spanish-English code-switching: El porque and how-not-to. Romance Philology, 28, 473–482.Google Scholar
Toribio, A. J.
(2001a) Accessing bilingual code-switching competence. International Journal of Bilingualism, 5, 403–436. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2001b) On the emergence of bilingual code-switching competence. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 203–231. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Volkova, S., Wilson, T., & Yarowsky, D.
(2013) Exploring sentiment in social media: Bootstrapping subjectivity clues from multilingual Twitter streams. Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp.505–510).Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Badiola, Lucia & Ariane Sande
2018. Gender assignment in Basque/Spanish mixed determiner phrases. In Code-switching – Experimental Answers to Theoretical Questions [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 19], ► pp. 15 ff. DOI logo
Koronkiewicz, Bryan
2019. Control Stimuli in Experimental Code-Switching Research. Languages 4:3 ► pp. 67 ff. DOI logo
2022. Adverbs in Spanish–English code-switching: Comparing verb raising and non-raising. International Journal of Bilingualism 26:2 ► pp. 227 ff. DOI logo
Sedarous, Yourdanis & Savithry Namboodiripad
2020. Using audio stimuli in acceptability judgment experiments. Language and Linguistics Compass 14:8 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 march 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.