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Poster Slam Session E, Thursday, August 22, 2019, 3:30 - 3:45 pm, Finlandia Hall, Brenda Rapp

Where do code-switching constraints apply? An ERP study of code-switching in Mandarin-Taiwanese sentences

Chia-Hsuan Liao1, Macie McKitrick1, Maria Polinsky1;1University of Maryland, College Park

Code switching (CS below) is a pervasive phenomenon of bilingual language use. Existing linguistic analyses show that CS is subject to a well-defined set of principles (Toribio, 2001); however, the place of these principles in grammar remains unclear; in particular, are these principles a reflection of grammatical constraints or rather, conditions on felicity? One of the better-studied principles is The Functional Head Constraint, FHC (Belazi, Rubin & Toribio, 1994). According to the FHC, a switch cannot occur between a functional head and its complement. The current study aims to test the validity of the FHC in a novel empirical domain (numerical classifier phrases, consisting of a numeral, a classifier, and a noun) and to use the results to address the question raised above: is the FHC a syntactic principle or a felicity constraint? Although existing studies do not manipulate the grammaticality of CS, they report that processing costs associated with CS include an N400 and a frontal negativity; these effects point to lexical-access difficulty and the inhibition of pre-activated representations (Liao & Chan, 2016; Proverbial et al., 2004). In our experiment, we tested CS between Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese, using numeral-classifier phrases (e.g., two-classifier apples), and verb phrases (e.g., ride-aspect bike) embedded in full-sentence contexts. In the numeral-classifier phrases, the grammatical condition involved a switch between a classifier and a classified noun; the ungrammatical condition had a switch between a numeral and a classifier. In the verb phrases, the grammatical condition involved a switch between a lexical verb and its object, and the ungrammatical condition had a switch between the verb and the aspectual marker. Each condition had a non-switched version as its baseline. We expected to obtain a grammatical violation response to the ungrammatical switch conditions, such as a LAN or a P600, on top of the aforementioned processing costs. Participants (N=31) were Mandarin-Taiwanese native speakers, proficient in both languages but more dominant in Mandarin. Sentences were presented with RSVP. Results replicated the findings in Liao & Chan (2016), showing that sentences with CS elicited a larger N400 and a late negativity. However, we did not find the interaction between Grammaticality and Switching in LAN or in P600 time windows. This result indicates that the ‘grammaticality’ of CS predicted by the FHC is too restrictive. We interpret this lack of LAN/P600 effects as an indication that the FHC is a felicity constraint, rather than a syntactic principle. In addition, we showed that switching costs could be modulated by lexical categories. While the switch between a verb and a noun evoked a larger N400 (as compared to the non-switched baseline), the N400 effect was considerably smaller in the switch between a numeral and a classifier (as compared to the the non-switched baseline). The smaller N400 effect in the numeral-classifier phrase as compared to the verb phrase could be due to a lower frequency of classifier constructions as opposed to verb-object constructions in both languages.

Themes: Multilingualism, Syntax
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)

Poster E38

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