Cognitive Science Seminar Series

U-M graduate student Natasha Vernooij (Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience) will present "Experimental Proposal: Bilingual Processing of Incongruent Codeswitches."

ABSTRACT
Bilinguals have a shared grammatical representation for constructions that follow the same word order in their two languages (congruent structures) (Hartsuiker & Pickering, 2008), and make language independent predictions for these constructions (de los Santos et al., 2019). There is also evidence that bilinguals have some sort of shared grammatical representation for constructions that do not follow the same word order in their two languages (incongruent structures) (Hsieh, 2017). However, it is unclear if all types of incongruent constructions have a shared mental representation, or if there is a limit on how different the word orders in the two languages can be to still have a shared representation. The proposed experiment investigates bilingual comprehension of incongruent codeswitched adjective/noun constructions in Spanish and English through the Stop Making Sense task (Mauner, Tanenhaus, & Carlson, 1995). Results will indicate what types of constructions have shared representations and to what extent bilinguals have a shared mental representation of their languages.