Code-switching attitudes and their effects on acceptability judgment tasks

Abstract

The present study examines the effects of code-switching (CS) attitudes in Acceptability Judgment Tasks (AJTs) among early Spanish/English bilinguals in the United States. In doing so, we explore whether negative attitudes towards CS result in lower/degraded ratings, and, likewise, whether positive attitudes result in higher acceptability ratings. Fifty Spanish/English bilinguals completed a survey that comprised a linguistic background questionnaire and a set of monolingual and code-switched sentences featuring two sets of stimuli, pro-drop (Sande, 2015) and pronouns (Koronkiewicz, 2014), that they rated on a 1–7 Likert scale; additionally, the survey included a final component that gathered information about the speakers’ attitudes towards CS. The pro-drop and pronouns code-switched stimuli gave rise to a total of four conditions. Results from a Linear Mixed Model revealed that all participants, regardless of attitude, distinguished between all Conditions. Furthermore, an effect for attitude was found for two of the conditions, such that the more positive the attitude, the higher the rating given on the AJT. In fact, these two conditions were composed of the CS structures that were rated higher by participants in Sande (2015) and Koronkiewicz (2014). No effect for attitude was found for CS structures that were rated low in the original studies. Thus, this investigation suggests that the attitudes that bilingual speakers have towards CS play a role in the ratings that they provide in AJTs, but in a manner that highlights, rather than obscures, the rule-governed nature of CS.

Acquiring L1-English L2-Spanish Code-Switching: The Role of Exposure to Language Mixing

“…This could be indicative of some inherent bias against CS as a stigmatized form of communication (Bullock and Toribio 2009;Montes-Alcalá 2001;Poplack 1980;among others). This is in line with Badiola et al (2018), who report that a negative perception of CS results in lower ratings in an AJT. As for the difference between the 2L1 and L2 groups, it is known that different groups of speakers can have variable biases, such as Liceras et al (2008) finding that L1 French speakers rated code-switched structures consistently lower than L1 English or L1 Spanish speakers.…”

Gender assignment in Basque/Spanish mixed determiner phrases

“…At home, 14 of the participants stated that they speak both languages, 2 of them reported to speak only Basque, and 5 of them only Spanish. Finally, most of them reported to have positive attitudes towards mixing both languages (see Badiola, Delgado, Sande and Stefanich, 2017). Nevertheless, some of them expressed that it is not something that they particularly like but that they understand that it is a natural phenomenon and that it comes with living in a bilingual community.…”

“…This questionnaire included questions related to age, sex, their level and language of education, as well as their linguistic proficiency in both Spanish and English and questions related to their bilingual habits and language use. They were also asked about their attitudes towards code-switching (seeBadiola, Delgado, Sande and Stefanich (2017) for discussion of how attitudes have an effect on participants' ratings in AJTs). Finally, the Spanish DELE was completed by our participants on a different day.…”

Field-Testing Code-Switching Constraints: A Report on a Strategic Languages Project

“…Corpora of spontaneous speech provide examples of possible and presumably acceptable code-switches but leave open the question of other potential switches not found in the corpora that may or may not occur in naturalistic speech. Acceptability judgments, while providing valuable data on speakers' metalinguistic awareness, frequently become entangled with prescriptivist objections to language mixing and do not always accurately reflect actual usage (e.g., Toribio 2001;Anderson 2006;Anderson and Toribio 2007;Badiola et al 2017). A third line of approach-the one exemplified in the present study-involves psycholinguistic techniques that probe bilinguals' code-switching intuitions while sidestepping explicit judgments.…”