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CLS Speaker Series – Anne Beatty (Penn State University) Examining the Effects of Codeswitching Experience on Bilingual Language Production and Comprehension
August 25, 2017
9:00 am
127 Moore

CLS Speaker Series – Anne Beatty (Penn State University) Examining the Effects of Codeswitching Experience on Bilingual Language Production and Comprehension

Examining the Effects of Codeswitching Experience on Bilingual Language Production and Comprehension

From a psycholinguistic perspective, codeswitching bears the hallmark of cross-language activation and represents a research tool to examine how bilinguals systematically (dis)engage two languages. Although research on codeswitching is increasingly growing, the processes that mediate the production and comprehension of this linguistic behavior are not well understood. One possibility explored in this talk is that production and comprehension processes may be differentially tuned by individuals’ experience with codeswitching. I will report on two studies investigating the effects of codeswitching experience on language processing. The first study involves a series of tasks examining how different production choices modulate electrophysiological activity in two groups of Spanish-English bilinguals who differed in codeswitching experience. In the second study, I examine bilingual picture naming performance of three Spanish-English bilingual groups from different interactional contexts. I discuss these results with respect to accounts of bilingual language processing and bilingual language control.