Two languages, one effect: Structural priming in spontaneous code-switching

We investigate here the contribution of code-switching and structural priming to variable expression of the Spanish first person singular subject pronoun in the New Mexican bilingual community. Comparisons with both Spanish and English benchmarks indicate no convergence of Spanish toward English gra...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inBilingualism (Cambridge, England) Vol. 19; no. 4; pp. 733 - 753
Main Authors TORRES CACOULLOS, RENA, TRAVIS, CATHERINE E.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.08.2016
Subjects
Bilingualism
Code switching
College Students
Community Relations
Conditioning
English language
Grammar
Heterogeneous Grouping
Immigration
Language
Language Variation
Linguistic Borrowing
Linguistics
Monolingualism
Native Speakers
Priming
Pronouns
Research Methodology
Romance Languages
Social Characteristics
Spanish language
Speech
Standard Spoken Usage
Studies
Teaching Methods
New Mexico
United States > US
bilingual contextual distribution hypothesis
code-switching
bilingual speech
structural priming
variable subject expression
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Summary:We investigate here the contribution of code-switching and structural priming to variable expression of the Spanish first person singular subject pronoun in the New Mexican bilingual community. Comparisons with both Spanish and English benchmarks indicate no convergence of Spanish toward English grammar, including in the presence of code-switching, where the linguistic conditioning of variant selection remains unaltered. We find a language-internal and cross-language priming effect, albeit of differing strength, such that speakers’ preceding coreferential (Spanish and English) subject pronouns favor subsequent pronouns, whereas unexpressed subjects tend to be followed by unexpressed subjects. Given the rarity of unexpressed subjects in English, in the presence of code-switching fewer tokens occur with unexpressed primes. Thus, code-switching has no intrinsic effect. Instead, it results in associated shifts in the distribution of contextual features relevant to priming, contrary to the convergence-via-code-switching hypothesis and in accordance with the contextual distribution-via-code-switching hypothesis, which we put forward here.
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ISSN:1366-7289
1469-1841
DOI:10.1017/S1366728914000406