TY - JOUR
T1 - Bilingual Prefabs
T2 - No Switching Cost Was Found in Cantonese–English Habitual Code-Switching in Hong Kong
AU - Hui, Nga Yan
AU - Fong, Manson Cheuk-Man
AU - Wang, William Shiyuan
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was funded by the studentship awarded to N.-Y. Hui by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University; the General Research Fund awarded to W.S. Wang, grant number GRF-15601718 and GRF-15606119. This work was partially supported by Research Institute for Smart Ageing of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 by the authors.
PY - 2022/9
Y1 - 2022/9
N2 - Previous studies on the comprehension of code-switched sentences often neglected the code-switching habit of the specific community, so that the processing difficulty might not have resulted from the change in language but from unnatural switching. This study explores the processing cost of habitual and nonhabitual code-switching. Thirty-one young adults participated in the sentence-reading task with their eye movement tracked. A two-by-two factorial design was used, with Habit (habitual/nonhabitual) and Language (unilingual/code-switched) as the factors. The main effect of Language was observed only in First Fixation Duration, suggesting that the language membership was already identified in an early processing stage. However, for habitual switches, no switching cost in overall processing effort was found, as reflected by Total Fixation Duration and Visit Counts. Our results indicate that the cognitive load was only larger when the switch occurred nonhabitually, regardless of the language membership. In light of this finding, we propose that habitual code-switching might promote the formation of bilingual collocations, or prefabs, which are then integrated into the mental lexicon of the dominant language. Despite a conscious language tag of a foreign origin, these bilingual prefabs are not processed as a language switch in the lexicon.
AB - Previous studies on the comprehension of code-switched sentences often neglected the code-switching habit of the specific community, so that the processing difficulty might not have resulted from the change in language but from unnatural switching. This study explores the processing cost of habitual and nonhabitual code-switching. Thirty-one young adults participated in the sentence-reading task with their eye movement tracked. A two-by-two factorial design was used, with Habit (habitual/nonhabitual) and Language (unilingual/code-switched) as the factors. The main effect of Language was observed only in First Fixation Duration, suggesting that the language membership was already identified in an early processing stage. However, for habitual switches, no switching cost in overall processing effort was found, as reflected by Total Fixation Duration and Visit Counts. Our results indicate that the cognitive load was only larger when the switch occurred nonhabitually, regardless of the language membership. In light of this finding, we propose that habitual code-switching might promote the formation of bilingual collocations, or prefabs, which are then integrated into the mental lexicon of the dominant language. Despite a conscious language tag of a foreign origin, these bilingual prefabs are not processed as a language switch in the lexicon.
KW - bilingual comprehension
KW - bilingualism
KW - code-switching
KW - mental lexicon
KW - prefabrication
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85138722800&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3390/languages7030198
DO - 10.3390/languages7030198
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85138722800
SN - 0001-9720
VL - 7
JO - Languages
JF - Languages
IS - 3
M1 - 198
ER -