Activation and local inhibition in the bilingual child’s processing of codeswitching

Abstract

Codeswitching has been used as a tool to investigate how the properties of the two language systems interact in the bilingual mind with relatively few studies investigating bilingual children. We target two groups of L1-Spanish–L2-English children in Spain to address language activation and language inhibition in the processing of codeswitching between a determiner (DET) and a noun (N). We investigate how the mental representation of the formal features involved is responsible for the sensitivity to grammatical gender, which in turn affects how bilinguals’ language activation and inhibition processes are at play and shape processing. We target both the directionality of the switch (English-DET–Spanish-N vs. Spanish-DET–English-N) and the type of implicit gender agreement mechanism (in the case of Spanish-DET–English-N switches) by using offline acceptability judgment data and eyetracking during reading data. Results suggest lower processing costs of English DET switches and higher ones of non-congruent Spanish DET switches. We interpret the preference for classifying the non-gendered Ns along the lines of the gendered Ns in the gendered language as evidence for the integrated representation hypothesis which states that both Ns depicting the same concept are connected in the mind of the bilingual.