Costs and Cues in the Auditory Comprehension of Code-switching

Bilinguals alternate frequently between languages, but many psycholinguistic studies on code-switching have reported a “switch cost”, i.e. an increased processing difficulty, in production (Meuter & Allport, 1999; Thomas & Allport, 2000; Costa & Santesteban, 2004; Gollan & Ferreira, 2009, although see Kleinman & Gollan, 2016), recognition (Soares & Grosjean, 1984), and comprehension (Olson, 2017). This dissertation involves three experiments investigating the factors modulating switch cost in the auditory comprehension of Mandarin and English code-switched words. First, recent research suggests that subtle phonetic differences between the pronunciation of code-switched utterances and unilingual utterances might act as anticipatory cues to code-switches for listeners (Piccinini & Garellek, 2014; Fricke, Kroll & Dussias, 2016), which could mitigate switch cost. Second, an “asymmetric switch cost,” or higher switch cost for the dominant first language (L1) compared to the second language (L2), has been reported for auditory comprehension of Spanish-English code-switches (Olson, 2017). Additionally, Mandarin-English bilinguals judge switches from English-to-Mandarin as infrequent compared to Mandarin-to-English switches (Lu, 1991; Ong & Zhang, 2010). Thus, Mandarin-English switching could be subject to a cost asymmetry driven not just by dominance but by frequency.Experiments 1 and 2 test the effects of withholding anticipatory phonetic cues on code-switched recognition by splicing English-to-Mandarin code-switches into unilingual English sentence contexts. Experiment 1 measured Mandarin-English bilinguals’ (N=42) reaction times in a concept monitoring task where they had to press a button when they heard a pictured object mentioned in an auditorily presented English sentence. The target word was either code-switched (i.e., in Mandarin) or unswitched. RTs were slower when the target was a code-switch, suggesting a switch cost. Experim