Language Switching in the Production of Phrases

Abstract

The language switching task has provided a useful insight into how bilinguals produce language. So far, however, the studies using this method have been limited to lexical access. The present study provides empirical evidence on language switching in the production of simple grammar structures. In the reported experiment, Polish-English unbalanced bilinguals switched between their L1 and L2 while describing pictures of ongoing and completed actions with simple SV progressive and perfective phrases. The results show asymmetrical switching costs for progressive phrases and symmetrical switching costs with reversed dominance for perfective phrases. These findings parallel those obtained in tasks requiring the production of single words, although the present study is the first in which the same bilingual participants display different patterns of switching costs depending on the characteristics of utterances they produce. These results can be explained using recently developed models of bilingual language control.

A sentence to remember: Instructed language switching in sentence production

“…Taken together, the study of Gullifer et al (2013) indicates that switch costs can be abolished in a sentence context, whereas Tarłowski et al (2013) showed substantial switch costs with sentences. Furthermore, sentence comprehension studies appear to be conflicting as well, with some studies finding no switch costs (Dussias, 2003;Ibáñez, Macizo, & Bajo, 2010) and other studies that do find switch costs in a sentence context (Philipp & Huestegge, in press;Proverbio, Leoni, & Zani, 2004).…”

“…This entails that in this study, responses were not measured immediately after switching from one language to another, but later on, which could have deteriorated the switch costs to the point that they were not observed anymore. Tarłowski, Wodniecka, and Marzecová (2013) also investigated language switching between sentences instead of between isolated words. Importantly, in this production study, switch costs were measured at the onset of the language switch (i.e., at the beginning of the sentence).…”

“…In order to do so, we compared language switching in the context of a syntactically structured sentence against scrambled sentences. Furthermore, in contrast to the study of Gullifer et al (2013) and Tarłowski et al (2013), who investigated language switching between sentences, the main focus lay on language switching within sentences, which is more closely related to intra-sentential code-switching (cf. van Hell et al, in press).…”

“…The study of Tarłowski et al (2013), who found switch costs with sentences, had a relatively small preparation time of 375 ms. Gullifer et al (2013) and the current study, on the other hand, found no switch costs in a sentence context with much longer preparation time (average of 3300 ms and 1200 ms respectively). Hence, it could be that language switch costs are reduced in a sentence context due to more effective preparation processes during sentence production.…”

A review of control processes and their locus in language switching

“…Some evidence for the involvement of lemmas during language control comes from studies that investigated language switching with sentences instead of single words, since each lemma includes the syntactic information of the word, and sentence processing is assumed to occur at the lemma level (for a review on bilingual models of sentence processing, see Hartsuiker & Pickering, 2008). Tarlowski, Wodniecka, et al (2013), for example, asked Polish-English bilinguals to describe a scene on a picture, either in a present progressive or a present perfective phrase. Their results indicated that language switch costs can be obtained when switching between sentences (for a similar result within sentences, see Bultena, Dijkstra, & van Hell, 2015).…”