Effects Of Second Language Proficiency On Language Switching At Sentential Level: Evidence From Eye Movements

Language switching has been an important research issue in bilingual lexical activation and has been the focus for domestic and foreign linguists and psychologists.With respect to two different processes-language production and language comprehension,researchers have conducted various studies with different paradigms. They have proposed several models of language switching and explored sources of language switching costs as well as different brain areas involved in language switching. However,there are still some deficiencies as following: 1) From the perspective of processing level,previous studies pay more attention to language production, however even fewer studies on language comprehension yield controversial results. 2) From the perspective of target language in language switching, most studies focus on alphabetic writing system, such as English,German and Spanish. But little attention is given to Chinese, which is the only one ideogram writing system in the world with unique characteristics. The study on switching between Chinese and English is even few. 3) From the perspective of presentation paradigm, most previous studies adopt the presentation of individual words without context,which is not in accordance with natural reading compared with language switching at sentential level. Moreover,lexical decision paradigm also involves task switching,so the results of language switching are not specific enough to explain the effect of language switching. 4) From the perspective of processing course, the classic reaction times reflect only the integrated results of the whole processing, which cannot give more insight into the further analysis of internal cognitive processes of language switchers. Considering the above deficiencies,the current study is to investigate the following research questions: 1)What are the features of language switching for Chinese-English bilinguals in sentential comprehension? 2) What effects can L2 proficiency make on the switching costs and the asymmetry?The current study adopted sentence reading paradigm with eye-tracking and involved sixty-eight unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals. There were thirty-four highly proficient bilinguals and thirty-four less proficient bilinguals. The results revealed: 1) There were significant language switching costs for Chinese-English bilinguals in sentential comprehension. Moreover, the switching costs from Chinese to English were larger than those from English to Chinese. From the perspective of time course, the asymmetry of switching cost became larger and larger with largest gap between the early stage and the late stage. 2) L2 proficiency had significant influence on the switching cost. Less proficient bilinguals revealed larger switching cost than highly proficient bilinguals and enjoyed more L1 benefits. Nevertheless, this difference was presented only at the late stage. In addition, L2 proficiency did neither influence the direction of switching nor affect the time course of switching.