The syntax and psycholinguistics of bilingual code mixing.

Abstract

Psychologists have traditionally focused on the functional separation of the two languages in the 'ideal' bilingual. However, recent studies on intrasentential code-switching, or Code Mixing (CM), show this to be a legitimate, highly structured bilingual communicative device with its own syntactic and sociolinguistic constraints. An examination of the syntactic properties of CM in particular the Dual Structure Constraint — reveals that CM is a highly sophisticated cognitive skill requiring an interactional bilingual competence. It is argued that CM throws new light on bilingual processing, e.g., the 'separate storage' hypothesis seems to be even less plausible, the 'assembly line' model of sentence production receives support, the view of CM as a simple subsitution of second language elements at surface structure level is rejected, and there seems to be a comparison stage in code-mixed sentence production.