Litcofsky, K. & van Hell, J.
Penn State University
Children who grow up speaking a second language (L2) as a heritage language often produce code-mixed utterances, which contain a mixture of words and phrases from both languages. As more proficient adults, bilinguals also produce utterances containing both languages, but which follow systematic patterns. While this codeswitching appears fluent, psycholinguistic and neurocognitive research has shown that switching between languages incurs a processing cost in both production and comprehension. However, the majority of studies examined language switching between isolated items, and little is known about the processing of codeswitches in sentence context. We investigated sentential codeswitching in Spanish-English bilinguals living in an L2 English environment, who codeswitch frequently in their daily life. Stimuli were 160 sentences that began in Spanish or English and could contain a codeswitch into the other language or not. All sentences were semantically and grammatically correct. Codeswitching was examined behaviorally, using self-paced reading, and with event-related potentials (ERPs). Preliminary results show that codeswitched words, as compared to non-switched words, are read more slowly and evoke an N400, and that these switch costs are larger when switching into the non-dominant language. Results will be discussed in terms of previous research and models of bilingual language processing, as well as how the nature of the switch cost may be related to proficiency in each of a bilingual's languages.