Kay González-Vilbazo
Sarah Downey
Jeanne Heil
Bryan Koronkiewicz
Laura Bartlett
Shane Ebert
Bradley Hoot
Sergio Ramos
In/Between Conference
Thursday, March 1, 2012

Outline
 Introduction
 E XAMPLE : Sluicing
 Methodological Concerns
 Participant Selection
 Stimuli Design
 Experimental Procedure
 Conclusions and Outlook
2

Introduction
 Code-switching (CS)
 The simultaneous use of two languages within a discourse by bilingual speakers
 Linguistic Theory
 Aims to understand the properties of speakers’ competence to access fundamental principles of the human language faculty
 Studies I-language
(Chomsky 1986)
, which is reflected in every speaker’s competence
3

Introduction
 CS and Linguistic Theory
 Bilingual speakers have competence
 They have clear intuitions about the acceptability of code-switched sentences
(Toribio 2001)
 CS falls within the range of possible human languages
 CS can give us access to combinations of linguistic elements that we may not otherwise be able to observe in monolingual data
(González-Vilbazo & López 2012)
 How do we access this competence?
4

Introduction
5

Introduction
 Goals
 Focus on methodological issues specific to CS research
 Provide illustrative examples and/or potential solutions to unique problems
 Not intended to take into account the breadth of issues related to linguistic methodology
 Intended to foment discussion, start a conversation, and build towards best practices
6

Outline
 Introduction
 E XAMPLE : Sluicing
 Methodological Concerns
 Participant Selection
 Stimuli Design
 Experimental Procedure
 Conclusions and Outlook
7

Example: Sluicing
(1) John threatened someone, but I don’t know who <John threatened>.
 Accounting for the deleted TP has been the subject of significant research
 Two main theories:
 Semantic identity
(Merchant 2001, van Craenenbroeck 2010)
 Beyond semantics
(Sag 1976, Chung 2006)
8

Example: Sluicing
 How can we bring empirical evidence to bear on this theoretical question?
 Morphosyntactic feature to investigate: Case
 Language pair: Spanish/German CS study
(González-
Vilbazo & Ramos forthcoming)
 Case is overtly marked on the wh-word remnant in both languages
 The verb threaten assigns accusative in Spanish, but dative in German
9

Example: Sluicing
 Monolingual Spanish and German
(2)
(3)
Juan amenazó a alguien, pero no sé a quién.
Juan threatened ACC someone but not know.1
SING ACC who
‘Juan threatened someone, but I don’t know who.’
Juan hat jemandem gedroht, aber ich weiß nicht wem.
Juan has someone.
DAT threatened but I know not who.
DAT
‘Juan threatened someone, but I don’t know who.’
10

Example: Sluicing
 Code-switching the sentences allows us to investigate if morphosyntax is in play
(4)
(5)
Juan amenazó a alguien , aber ich weiß nicht wen.
Juan threatened ACC someone, but I know not who.
ACC
‘Juan threatened someone, but I don’t know who.’
* Juan amenazó a alguien , aber ich weiß nicht wem.
Juan threatened ACC someone, but I know not who.
DAT
‘Juan threatened someone, but I don’t know who.’
 Supports the “beyond semantics” account
(Sag 1976, Chung
2006)
11

Outline
 Introduction
 E XAMPLE : Sluicing
 Methodological Concerns
 Participant Selection
 Stimuli Design
 Experimental Procedure
 Conclusions and Outlook
12

Participant Selection
 Maximum degree of overlap between bilinguals and their monolingual counterparts
 Need not be global
 At least with respect to relevant feature(s) amenazar
ACC
Monolingual Bilingual
13

Participant Selection
 How can we verify this?
 In addition to code-switched stimuli, test monolingual items to assess L
A
(and/or L
B features)
 E XAMPLE : Spanish/German CS study
(González-Vilbazo &
Ramos forthcoming)
 Monolingual Spanish dative vs. accusative assignment
 E XAMPLE : Spanish/English CS study
(Hoot in preparation)
 Monolingual English that-trace effect differences
(6)
(7)
Who i do you believe t i saw Edgar?
* Who i do you believe that t i saw Edgar?
14

Participant Selection
5,00
Mean scores of included vs. excluded participants
4,20
4,00
3,29
3,00
2,60
2,05
Participants with that-trace effect (included)
Participants without thattrace effect (excluded)
2,00
1,00
Who did John say que compró el libro ?
Who did John say that compró el libro ?
15

Outline
 Introduction
 E XAMPLE : Sluicing
 Methodological Concerns
 Participant Selection
 Stimuli Design
 Experimental Procedure
 Conclusions and Outlook
16

Stimuli Design
 Naturalness of CS
 Grammaticality judgments are constrained by performance issues, including real-world plausibility
(Bader & Häussler 2010)
 Lexical items
 E XAMPLE : Spanish/Taiwanese CS study
(González-
Vilbazo, Bartlett, Ebert & Vergara in preparation)
17

Stimuli Design
 Code-switched Spanish and Taiwanese
(8) Mirta compró hia-e tue-chit riab bat-zang ?
Mirta bought those which CL rice-dumpling
‘Which of those rice dumplings did Mirta buy?’
(9) Mirta compró hia-e tue-chit pun ttse ?
Mirta bought those which CL book
‘Which of those books did Mirta buy?’
 A bat-zang is a rice dumpling specific to Taiwanese culture
 To paraphrase our consultant: If you are talking about books, why switch?
18

Stimuli Design
 Modality of Stimuli Presentation
 CS can be influenced by prosody, pauses, etc.
(MacSwan 1999, Toribio 2001)
 Although sometimes written, CS is primarily a spoken phenomenon
 Aural stimuli
+ phonological control - harder to create/administer
+ more natural
 Written stimuli
+ easier to create/administer - no phonological control
+ common theoretical practice
 E XAMPLE : Spanish/English CS study
(Hoot in preparation)
19

Stimuli Design
20

Outline
 Introduction
 E XAMPLE : Sluicing
 Methodological Concerns
 Participant Selection
 Stimuli Design
 Experimental Procedure
 Conclusions and Outlook
21

Experimental Procedure
 Potential confounds
 CS is often subject to stigma
(Poplack 1980)
 The results may be artificially depressed
 CS is influenced by situation
 Participants should be comfortable producing or listening to mixed language
(Grosjean 1998)
 Bilingual language mode continuum
(Grosjean 1985,
1994, 1997, 1998, 2001)
22

Experimental Procedure
 Potential solutions
 Instructions in CS
 Priming
 Training
 E XAMPLE : Spanish/English CS study
(González-Vilbazo &
Koronkiewicz submitted)
Confounds
Stigma Comfort Level Mode Continuum
Instructions in CS (+) + +
Priming
Training + +
+
+
23

Experimental Procedure
Mean scores by training type
5,00
4,00
3,00
3,53
4,18
2,00
1,66 1,67
1,00
Ella fights all the time.
Ese duende fights all the time.
No CS-specific training
CS-specific training
24

Outline
 Introduction
 E XAMPLE : Sluicing
 Methodological Concerns
 Participant Selection
 Stimuli Design
 Experimental Procedure
 Conclusions and Outlook
25

 Participant Selection
 Overlap between monolinguals and bilinguals with respect to relevant feature(s)
 Stimuli Design
 Choose relevant features and language pairs, naturalness of CS, modality of stimuli
 Experimental Procedure
 Instructions in CS, priming tasks, and training to help with possible stigmatization, situational influence and the mode continuum
26

 One step forward
 Report on these issues clearly in the literature
 Ultimate goal
 Have discipline-wide standards
27

References
Bader, Markus, & Jana Häussler. 2010. Toward a model of grammaticality judgments. Journal of Linguistics 46.
273-330.
Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Knowledge of Language. New York: Praeger.
Chung, Sandra. 2006. Sluicing and the lexicon: The point of no return. In Rebecca T. Cover & Yuni Kim (eds.)
Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 31. 73–91. Berkeley, California: Berkeley
Linguistics Society.
van Craenenbroeck, Jeroen & Anikó Lipták. 2009. What sluicing can do, what it can’t and in which language: On the cross-linguistic syntax of ellipsis. Ms. HUB.
González-Vilbazo, Kay, Laura Bartlett, Shane Ebert & Daniel Vergara. In preparation. Wh constructions in
Taiwanese-Spanish code-switching.
González-Vilbazo, Kay & Bryan Koronkiewicz. Submitted. Pronouns in Spanish-English code-switching.
González-Vilbazo, Kay & Luis López. 2012. Little v and parametric variation. Natural Language & Linguistic
Theory, 30(1). 33-77.
González-Vilbazo, Kay & Sergio E. Ramos. Forthcoming. A Morphosyntactic condition on sluicing: Evidence from Spanish/German code-switching.
Grosjean, Francois. 1985. The bilingual as a competent but specific speaker-hearer. Journal of Multilingual and
Multicultural Development 6. 467-477.
28

References
Grosjean, Francois. 1994. Individual bilingualism. The encyclopedia of language and linguistics. 1656-1660.
Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Grosjean, Francois. 1997. Processing mixed language: Issues, findings, and models. In A. M. B. de Groot & J. F.
Kroll (eds.), Tutorials in bilingualism: Psycholinguistic perspectives. 225-254. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
Grosjean, Francois. 2001. The bilingual’s language modes. In Janet L. Nicol (ed.) One Mind, Two Languages:
Bilingual Language Processing. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hoot, Bradley. In preparation. Complementizers in Spanish/English code-switching.
MacSwan, Jeff. 1999. A Minimalist Approach to Intrasentential Code Switching. New York: Garland Pub.
Merchant, Jason. 2001. The syntax of silence: Sluicing, islands, and the theory of ellipsis. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Poplack, Shana. 1980 Sometimes I'll start a sentence in Spanish Y TERMINO EN ESPAÑOL: Toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics 18(7/8). 581-618.
Sag, Ivan. 1976. Deletion and logical form. Doctoral dissertation, MIT. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Toribio, Almeida Jacqueline. 2001. On the emergence of code-switching competence. Bilingualism: Language
and Cognition 4(3). 203-231.
29

Acknowledgments
 We would like to acknowledge and thank:
 Luis López, Lukasz Adamczyk, Christian Alvarado, Jesse
Banwart, Blanca Bustos, Enas El-Khatib, Liz Remitz, Marlen
Romero, Ivette Serrano, Jack Waas, Kara Morgan-Short and the members of the Cognition of Second Language
Acquisition Laboratory
 This material is based upon work supported by:
 National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1146457
 UIC Provost’s Award for Graduate Research
Thank you!
30