¡Hola! Nice to Meet You: Language Mixing and Biographical Information Processing

Abstract

In bilingual communities, social interactions take place in both single- and mixed-language contexts. Some of the information shared in multilingual conversations, such as interlocutors’ personal information, is often required in consequent social encounters. In this study, we explored whether the autobiographical information provided in a single-language context is better remembered than in an equivalent mixed-language situation. More than 400 Basque-Spanish bilingual (pre) teenagers were presented with new persons who introduced themselves by either using only Spanish or only Basque, or by inter-sententially mixing both languages. Different memory measures were collected immediately after the initial exposure to the new pieces of information (immediate recall and recognition) and on the day after (delayed recall and recognition). In none of the time points was the information provided in a mixed-language fashion worse remembered than that provided in a strict one-language context. Interestingly, the variability across participants in their sociodemographic and linguistic variables had a negligible impact on the effects. These results are discussed considering their social and educational implications for bilingual communities.

Family Attitudes towards Multilingualism in Bilingual Education Programs and Their Relationship with Academic Performance

“…The heterogeneity of attitudes towards code-switching, together with its role as the strongest predictor of academic achievement, suggests that there is still some work to be performed on the part of educators and language scientists to convey to the general public that codeswitching and language-mixing practices are indeed a natural reality of multilingual communities. In fact, it is important to explain that not only has code-switching been proven not to have negative consequences, overall, but especially in the school environment [45,46], but it is indeed suspected to entail benefits for language production [47,48]. In this sense, translanguaging educational practices might be particularly beneficial for achieving a more active multilingual status [49][50][51] without any identifiable negative consequences for learning, language outcomes, or general cognition.…”

Exploring students’ perception towards teachers’ oral feedback in EFL classroom

“…While the world as a whole is becoming less monolingual (Anton & Dunabeitia, 2021) and more multilingual (O'Shannessy, 2020), the United States continues to use only two official languages: its native one and English. This practice, known as "code-switching," resembles a "selective celebration of linguistic diversity" (Berthele, 2020).…”