Week of Mar 31

LangCog 

The next LangCog meeting of the semester will be on Tuesday, April 1 from 5:30-7:00pm! It will take place in William James Hall, Room #1550. The speaker this week is Kalinka Timmer (University of Warsaw), and the title and abstract of the talk can be found below. Food will be available at the meeting, and you can find the schedule for the remainder of the semester on their website.

Title: Languages in interaction: do bilinguals switch languages flexibly and easily?

Abstract: Bilinguals have two words to name each object or concept—one in each language—and must decide which language to speak or switch to. While laboratory studies have investigated the cost of language switching (index of bilingual language control mechanisms) using simple picture naming tasks, daily conversations suggest switching occurs more fluidly, guided by the linguistic environment with (1) contextual and (2) social cues. Do bilinguals adapt to environmental demands (1) such as primarily using their first language at home but the second in the office and (2) match their interlocutor's language? I aim to understand how language switching mechanisms adjust to different environmental information to achieve successful communication.

First, I revealed that bilinguals flexibly adapt their language control mechanisms (i.e., the magnitude of switch costs and reversed language dominance change) to the L1- and L2-dominant language contexts. These control adjustments are sustained beyond the L1- and L2-dominant contexts. Thus, control mechanisms are highly adaptive to contextual demands rather than solely determined by language proficiency or other fixed speaker traits. Second, I showed that incorporating conversational elements, such as question cues (e.g., “What’s this?”) into classical laboratory paradigms using arbitrary cues (e.g., red and blue color frames) reduced switch costs. In contrast, the reversed language dominance index of language control was not modulated consistently by social-linguistic cues. Thus, I advocate that this conversational switching paradigm could be used as a conceptually more accurate measure of language control, thereby avoiding artificially created requirements by arbitrary cues. To conclude, bilingual language control adapts flexibly to linguistic contexts and is easier in everyday interactions.

 

Linguistics Courses Fall25

Fall registration is opening on April 2. The Department of Linguistics will be offering many exciting courses in the Fall, including: 

  • LING 83: Language, Structure and Cognition; 
  • LING 106: Knowledge of Meaning; 
  • LING 103: Language in its Social Context;
  • LING 108: Introduction to Historical Linguistics;
  • American Sign Language (ASL) courses at Beginning or Advanced level. 

Check them out if you or any of your friends are interested! 

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