SPAN 522: Theoretical Approaches to Multilingual Language Knowledge and Behavior-Code-switching

This seminar will provide an examination of code-switching (CS), combining historical grounding with contemporary experimental approaches. We will begin with a historical overview of seminal work in the field, with particular attention to the emergence of syntactic constraint-based approaches to CS and their role in establishing that code-switched language is systematic and governed by linguistic principles rather than “a-lingual.” As we examine these approaches, we will also consider the methodological foundations on which theoretical claims have been built, including the nature and limitations of different types of data and data-collection paradigms. The second part of the course will turn to contemporary psycholinguistic approaches to CS, focusing on how bilingual speakers produce, comprehend, and adapt to language switches in real time. We will examine experimental paradigms used to study CS, including picture naming, reading tasks, eye-tracking, pupillometry, electrophysiological methods, and experimental manipulations of switch location, grammatical structure, contextual predictability, and exposure. Particular attention will be given to the relationship between experimental design and theoretical claims: what different measures can tell us about the cognitive processes involved in switching, how experimentally elicited switching relates to naturally occurring CS, and how corpus evidence can be used to motivate and constrain laboratory experiments. Students will critically evaluate existing experimental designs and will develop an experimentally testable research question on CS, identifying appropriate materials, manipulations, measures, and predictions. Throughout the course, we will bring linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches into conversation, asking how grammatical structure, experience, community-level patterns, and cognitive mechanisms jointly shape when, where, and how bilinguals switch languages.