LSLT: Lauren Salig (NACS)

Lunch will be served starting at 12:15. (Vegan options availalble, but GF options could be a bit odd... like a lettuce wrap. Let us know if you have other dietary restrictions!)

The Effect of Bilingual Code-switching on Attention and Memory

Abstract: As bilinguals converse, they may fluidly code-switch between languages. However, bilingual comprehenders take longer to process a code-switch than a single-language equivalent (e.g., Bultena et al., 2015), which has been explained as switches being costly. An alternate explanation is that processing costs in comprehension are not a delay as listeners struggle to recover and reanalyze, but rather a pause as listeners draw inferences and strategically direct their attention to help them process the rest of the sentence more effectively.
I hypothesize that hearing a code-switch boosts bilinguals' attention and improves their memory for code-switched information. To test this hypothesis, we first recruited monolinguals for a study to validate our virtual method for measuring participants' attention. I will demonstrate that our remote mind-wandering method is a valid technique for approaching our questions of interest. Then, I'll discuss the results of our study in which Spanish-English bilinguals each listened to one code-switched and one single-language story while periodically self-reporting their level of attention.