Testing the Cognitive Load Hypothesis: Repair Rates and Usage in a Bilingual Community

Abstract

It has been assumed that bilingual speakers have a heavier cognitive load than monolinguals, which may be responsible for language change such as simplification, overgeneralization, transfer and code-switching. While the cognitive load hypothesis is interesting, the hypothesis has not been empirically tested using naturally occurring speech. Using data from a Spanish/English bilingual community, this study operationalizes and tests the cognitive load hypothesis by studying disfluencies in two groups of Spanish speakers with varying degrees of English proficiency. Specifically, truncated utterances and the mechanisms of linguistic repair involved in fixing these disfluencies are examined. The results show measurable differences between the two groups. The group of speakers with higher bilingual proficiency, who are predicted to have a heavier cognitive load, shows a significantly higher rate of repair; additionally the syntactic patterns and types of repair are significantly different between the more bilingual and the less bilingual speakers, suggesting that they use repair in divergent ways. There is not sufficient evidence, however, to conclude that the more bilingual speakers have a higher cognitive load.

The emergent grammar of bilinguals: The Spanish verb hacer ‘do’ with a bare English infinitive

“…In testing the cognitive load hypothesis here, we use Dumont (2010) as a point of departure. In examining disfluencies in bilinguals, Dumont (2010, p. 4) proposed the following operationalization of the cognitive load hypothesis in another study of New Mexican Spanish: … if more bilingual speakers have a heavier cognitive load than less bilingual speakers, then the more bilingual speakers will demonstrate higher overall rates of repair, different types of repair, repair affecting different parts of speech, and increased rates of repair preceding other language items.…”

Multimodal language in bilingual and monolingual children: Gesture production and speech disfluency

“…Being disfluent is a part of a healthy speech production, yet the likelihood of being disfluent might differ across populations and individuals. Although age has been considered an important variable while studying disfluency (e.g., Bortfeld et al, 2001;Cooper, 1990), there is relatively limited focus on bilingualism to understand disfluent speech, especially from a developmental perspective (e.g., Brundage & Rowe, 2018;Dumont, 2010). Previous research on bilingual children's language development suggests that bilinguals may reach language competency later than monolinguals (Bialystok, Luk, Peets & Yang, 2010;Oller, Pearson & Cobo-Lewis, 2007).…”

Uh, bueno, em… : Filled pauses as a site of contact-induced change in Boston Spanish

“…One potential explanation is suggested by the cognitive-load hypothesis , which features prominently in Silva-Corvalán's (1994:6) research on Spanish speakers in Los Angeles: “In language contact situations, bilinguals develop strategies aimed at lightening the cognitive load of having to remember and use two different linguistic systems” (though see Dumont [2010] for a critique of this claim). With this in mind, the overextension of [a] at the expense of [e] might be viewed as a way of converging on a more generalized FP strategy, one that could be employed whether an individual was speaking in either Spanish or English, and thus be less cognitively burdensome.…”