Exploring the Effect of Syntactic Alignment on Chinese-English Bilinguals' Code-switched Sentence Production

Mengling Xu

Source Title: International Journal of Translation, Interpretation, and Applied Linguistics (IJTIAL)3(2)

ISSN: 2575-6974|EISSN: 2575-6982|EISBN13: 9781799863250|DOI: 10.4018/IJTIAL.20210701.oa3

MLA

Xu, Mengling. "Exploring the Effect of Syntactic Alignment on Chinese-English Bilinguals' Code-switched Sentence Production." IJTIAL vol.3, no.2 2021: pp.31-45. http://doi.org/10.4018/IJTIAL.20210701.oa3

APA

Xu, M. (2021). Exploring the Effect of Syntactic Alignment on Chinese-English Bilinguals' Code-switched Sentence Production. International Journal of Translation, Interpretation, and Applied Linguistics (IJTIAL), 3(2), 31-45. http://doi.org/10.4018/IJTIAL.20210701.oa3

Chicago

Xu, Mengling. "Exploring the Effect of Syntactic Alignment on Chinese-English Bilinguals' Code-switched Sentence Production," International Journal of Translation, Interpretation, and Applied Linguistics (IJTIAL) 3, no.2: 31-45. http://doi.org/10.4018/IJTIAL.20210701.oa3

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Abstract

As one of the most common language phenomena in bilingual settings, code-switching has been studied widely to explore its nature and features. In the current study, the author set out to explore the effect of syntactic alignment on Chinese-English bilinguals' code-switched sentence production using a picture-describing task with a structural priming paradigm. The structural priming paradigm has been frequently used to explore the mechanisms of sentence production. The effect of syntactic alignment was observed, indicating Chinese-English bilinguals were inclined to produce code-switched sentences with the same syntactic structure between Chinese and English. The findings provide empirical evidence not only supporting structural priming during bilingual code-switched sentence production, but also extending the interactive alignment model (Pickering and Garrod, 2004) to interpret code-switching during bilingual sentence production. Implications for code-switching and bilingual sentence processing are discussed.