161 / 2021-06-29 22:28:21

The Effect of the Non-task Language on Code Switching in Trilinguals’ Language Production

trilinguals, language switching, task language, non-task language, mixing cost.

This study explored the effect of non-task language on a code switching in a language production experiment. Non-task language refers to languages which participants do not use in any trials throughout the experiment regardless of the proficiency level. We recruited 180 Tibetan-Chinese-English trilinguals (10^th-grade high school students with a median age of 17) in the Gannan high school from ethic minority areas in China to take part in a language switching task which asked participants to name pictures using only two of their two languages in each experiment. We launched three experiments to each language pair once, that is, participants were required to perform Tibetan-Chinese (L1-L2), Tibetan-English (L1-L3) and Chinese-English (L2-L3) picture naming tasks. In order to examine the role of non-task language, participants were divided into non-task language higher-level group and non-task language lower-level group with their two task languages being comparable.

The research question is whether the non-task language has an effect on production-based code switching between any two languages of the Tibetan-Chinese-English trilinguals? Naming latencies and error rate would be examined to evaluate their performance. The results showed that the non-task language indeed affect the switching cost in all three experiments, and the the response time was larger for less proficient language than that of dominant language, which demonstrated that speakers unconsciously employed the cognitive language strategies. This study also indicated that language selection in trilinguals relied on language non-specific hypothesis and this hypothesis depended on an inhibitory process.