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

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.