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Article published In: Methodologies for intra-sentential code-switching research
Edited by Amaia Munarriz-Ibarrola, M. Carmen Parafita Couto and Emma Vanden Wyngaerd
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 8:1] 2018
► pp. 5–24

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Code-switching attitudes and their effects on acceptability judgment tasks

ORCiD logo with link | University of Illinois at Chicago
 | University of Illinois at Chicago
 | University of Illinois at Chicago
 | University of Illinois at Chicago
Published online: 6 February 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.16006.bad
Abstract
The present study examines the effects of code-switching (CS) attitudes in Acceptability Judgment Tasks (AJTs) among early Spanish/English bilinguals in the United States. In doing so, we explore whether negative attitudes towards CS result in lower/degraded ratings, and, likewise, whether positive attitudes result in higher acceptability ratings. Fifty Spanish/English bilinguals completed a survey that comprised a linguistic background questionnaire and a set of monolingual and code-switched sentences featuring two sets of stimuli, pro-drop (Sande, A. (2015). How to drop the pro: evidence from code-switching. Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (HLS), University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, September 25th 2015.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and pronouns (Koronkiewicz, B. (2014). Pronoun Categorization: Evidence from Spanish/English Code-Switching (Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), that they rated on a 1–7 Likert scale; additionally, the survey included a final component that gathered information about the speakers’ attitudes towards CS. The pro-drop and pronouns code-switched stimuli gave rise to a total of four conditions. Results from a Linear Mixed Model revealed that all participants, regardless of attitude, distinguished between all Conditions. Furthermore, an effect for attitude was found for two of the conditions, such that the more positive the attitude, the higher the rating given on the AJT. In fact, these two conditions were composed of the CS structures that were rated higher by participants in Sande, A. (2015). How to drop the pro: evidence from code-switching. Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (HLS), University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, September 25th 2015.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar and Koronkiewicz, B. (2014). Pronoun Categorization: Evidence from Spanish/English Code-Switching (Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar. No effect for attitude was found for CS structures that were rated low in the original studies. Thus, this investigation suggests that the attitudes that bilingual speakers have towards CS play a role in the ratings that they provide in AJTs, but in a manner that highlights, rather than obscures, the rule-governed nature of CS.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Background
    • On the use of CS as a tool in experimental syntax
  • Language attitudes towards Spanish/English CS in the US
  • Method
    • Participants
    • Experimental stimuli
    • Procedure
    • Analysis
  • Results
  • Discussion
  • Conclusions and limitations
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (36)
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