The authors report 4 experiments exploring the language-switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals in a picture-naming task. In Experiment 1, they tested the impact of language similarity and age of 2nd language acquisition on the language-switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 assessed the…

Contesting the monolingualist assumptions in composition, this article identifies textual and pedagogical spaces for World Englishes in academic writing. It presents code meshing as a strategy for merging local varieties with Standard Written English in a move toward gradually pluralizing academic writing and developing multilingual competence for…

This study, part of an on-going investigation, analyzes the syntactic aspects of code-switching. A series of empirical studies has confirmed that there are only two general linguistic constraints where code-switching may occur, the free morpheme constraint and the equivalence constraint. This study describes in formal terms how the two constraints…

This study is based on the general finding that the linguistic reality of a bilingual community is complex and that the two languages are not compartmentalized into any particular spheres of social life. It uses this finding to explore a theoretical position that treats facts regarding language functions and usage as if these, in and of…

The interaction of two elementary-age American children with their bilingual mother and French-speaking peers was monitored to determine learning strategies in a natural French immersion situation. Seven strategies were discovered, each of which provided the necessary ingredients of processible input, practice, and feedback to the language…

The author reviews the literature on code switching (use of two languages within a turn of speaking) as part of the conversational speech in normal and retarded individuals, presents data on language interaction in the speech of seven developmentally disabled persons, and discusses the implications of these comparisons for program planning with…

The phonological rules at work in code-mixing of Hungarian and English are described, with special reference to Hungarian vowel harmony and its influence on the entire system. The corpus available for describing this code-mixture is a written text in the form of a casually written letter. Both Hungarian and English orthographic rules have…

This paper illustrates how the sociolinguistic concept of code switching applies to the use of different styles of music. The two bases for the analogy are Labov's definition of code-switching as "moving from one consistent set of co-occurring rules to another," and the finding of sociolinguistics that code switching tends to be part of…

A brief report of some preliminary findings obtained from a sociolinguistics census of Chicano college students attending a university in Southwest Texas is presented. Findings reported deal with: (1) general patterns of language usage as reported by students, and (2) the students' evaluative responses to code-switching phrases controlled for…

Proposes a method for describing the relationship between writing error and style shifting rates across communicative situations. Finds that errors diminished in proportion to the tendency of students to select grammatical features that are shared by Black American English and Standard American English in formal communicative situations. (RAE)

A study of linguistic judgment tasks and lexical decision tasks among English-German bilinguals supports the hypotheses that bilinguals have knowledge of two sets of phonotactic constraints, and that both sets of constraints are simultaneously available to the individual during language processing. (MSE)

Tests the hypothesis that mothers would label objects with adult-basic level terms when talking to other adults, but would label the same objects with child-basic terms when speaking to their young children who were just starting to talk, even though these labels may be very much "incorrect" by adult standards. (Author/RH)

Spanish/English bilingual 5 to 11-year-old children were interviewed in both languages to assess the reliability of their language background self-ratings. (CM)

Describes some aspects of "interlingual contagion" between siSwati and English in Swaziland, focusing on borrowing and code switching and the derived "Englishization of siSwati and Swazification of English. These phenomena are examined via a mode of bilingualism that presumes that all languages carry indexical meanings both on…

Explores an Optimality-Theoretic approach to account for observed cross-linguistic patterns of code switching that assumes that code switching strives for well-formedness. Optimization of well-formedness in code switching is shown to follow from (violable) ranked constraints. An argument is advanced that code-switching patterns emerge from…