Exploring the recognition of guest words in bilingual speech

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Abstract
Bilinguals, i.e. those who use two languages in their everyday lives, move in and out of various speech modes when speaking to different interlocutors. When conversing with monolinguals, they speak one language and reduce the activation level of the other language, but when conversing with other bilinguals they choose a base language of interaction and often bring in the other language by either code-switching or borrowing. The aim of the present study is to explore how “guest words” (code-switches and borrowings) are processed by bilingual listeners when interacting with other bilinguals. Different types of English words (varying in phonotactic configuration and lexicon membership) were embedded in French sentences and were produced either as code-switches or borrowings. The gating paradigm (Grosjean, 1980) was used to present these words to French-English bilingual listeners so as to determine the role played by word type and language phonetics in the lexical access of guest words, as well as to uncover the underlying operations involved in the recognition process. Results showed that the phonotactics of a guest word, the presence or absence of a base language homophone, the language phonetics of the word, as well as the language that precedes the word, all play a role in the recognition process. An interactive activation view of bilingual word recognition is proposed to account for the results found in the study.