Eye Tracking Technology in Detecting the Switch Cost in the Intra-sentential Code-Switching Contexts

Abstract

Abstract-Switch cost and cost site have been controversial issues in the code-switching studies. This research conducted an eye tracking experiment on eight bilingual subjects to measure their switch cost and cost site in comprehending the intra-sentential code-switching (Chinese and English) and the unilingual (pure Chinese) stimuli. The English words and their Chinese translations or equivalents were assumed as the key words in either a unilingual or an intra-sentential code-switching paragraph. These key words were located as areas of interest (AOI) with the same height and consisted of three wordfrequency levels. After the experiment, the subjects were required to do a comprehension test to ensure their real understanding of the English words. Their performances in two different reading contexts were compared by adopting a paired sample t-test. Their eye movement data were validated by using 2 x 3 repeated measures ANOVA. It was revealed that: 1) the subjects' scores in the intra-sentential code-switching contexts were higher than those in the unilingual ones, i.e. reading efficiency increased in the intra-sentential code-switching contexts; 2) word frequency had little effect on word recognition speed in the intra-sentential code-switching contexts, i.e., the least frequently used words did not necessarily take the subjects' more time or vice versa; 3) even if a switch cost occurred(on rare occasions), it was not necessarily at the switching site, and low frequency words in alternating languages did impair performance even when the switch occurred at a sentence boundary.Keywords-eye tracking; switch cost; unilingual; intra-sentential codeswitching; word frequency IntroductionMost studies for switch cost derive from the lexical-decision-task study revolving around the words or non-words in two different languages with similar lexical features [1]. However, this research compared subjects' comprehension performances in the pure Chinese-unilingual and the Chinese-English-intra-sentential codeswitching (a code switch that occurs within a sentence or a clause) contexts which have different orthographic systems. Different word-frequency levels were also taken into account since word frequencies are often considered to be the main cause of the switch cost.

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