Triggering effects on code-switching

A striking characteristic of bilingual language processing is codeswitching, the use of two languages in one utterance. Though this switching between two languages seems effortless, as self-reports of bilinguals confirm, behavioral and ERP-studies report switching costs in language comprehension and production studies. How does a codeswitch (CS) come about? The triggering hypothesis (Clyne, 2003) states that cognates (words with semantic and form overlap in two languages, e.g. appel-apple) can cause a code-switch within a sentence. Corpus studies (Broersma & de Bot, 2006) indeed found that code-switches are more likely after a cognate. Because of this evidence for triggering at the lexical level, we wondered whether triggering effects could be extended to the conceptual level. Therefore, we examined whether a socio-contextual trigger (a reference to a cultural language-specific item, such as a red double decker bus) would affect the processing of a code-switch, using both behavioral and ERP-paradigms. Dutch-English bilinguals first read a sentence with a socio-contextual trigger (congruent with the language of the CS) or a socio-contextual non-trigger (congruent with the language of the sentence), followed by a sentence containing a code-switch. These sentences could be either in Dutch (with a code-switch to English) or in English (with a code-switch to Dutch). Example sentences of the English-Dutch condition are below. Example socio-contextual trigger: For your daily groceries you can shop at Albert Heijn. This well-known store also sells speelgoed to its costumers. Example non-trigger: For your daily groceries you can shop at Wal-Mart. This well- known store also sells speelgoed to its costumers. The code-switch ‘speelgoed’ [toys] is italicized. The name of a Dutch supermarket (A lbert Heijn) is a trigger for the Dutch word ‘speelgoed’ [toys]. In the non-trigger condition, this name is replaced by an American supermarket. When switching from L1 (Dutch) to L2 (English), socio-contextual triggering showed a marginally significant effect on the reading times of the CS in the behavioral studies. This effect was also found in the ERP-study, in which we found a slight modulation of the N400-component time-locked to the code-switch. We found no effects when switching from L2 to L1. In the discussion, these results of triggered code-switching will be related to current (neuro)cognitive models on bilingual processing