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LSLT: Mike Johns (ARLIS)

Time: 
Thursday, October 22, 2020 - 12:30 PM
Location: 
https://go.umd.edu/lslt-zoom

 

What Translanguaging Can Tell Us About Bilingual Language Control: Evidence from Spontaneous Codeswitching

Abstract: A common practice often attested in bilingual and multilingual communities the world over is the fluid combination of languages within a single sentence or conversation, a phenomenon known as codeswitching. While sociolinguistic studies of spontaneous codeswitching have demonstrated its structure and systematicity, psycholinguistic approaches have sought to understand the cognitive mechanisms underlying language switching, focusing on its purported costliness or difficulty. A common assumption in this literature has been that switching between two languages requires a back-and-forth of inhibition as bilinguals deactivate one language and activate the other. This assumption, however, may not extend to spontaneous codeswitching as it occurs in natural speech. In the present study, we examine a prosodically transcribed corpus of spontaneous bilingual speech from a long-standing community of Spanish-English bilinguals in northern New Mexico. We find that speech rate—a proxy for costliness during speech planning and production—is actually fastest when bilinguals codeswitch compared to speaking only one language at a time. We argue that these findings are congruent with the notion of translanguaging, which Otheguy, García, and Reid (2015:283) define as “the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named...languages.” Lastly, when viewed in this light, the notion that codeswitching involves a literal switch from one language to the other can be recast as the bilingual ‘opening the gates’ of language control, allowing both languages to contribute opportunistically to the task at hand (e.g. Green, 2018).

References:
Green, D. W. (2018). Language Control and Code-Switching. Languages, 3(8). https://doi.org/10.3390/languages3020008.
Otheguy, R., García, O., & Reid, W. (2015). Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics. Applied Linguistics Review, 6(3), 281-307. https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2015-0014.