codeswitching

[codeswitching]

Foreword

After defending a thesis on plurilingual speaking in 2018, I decided to study another facet of languages in contact, namely how the underlying systems of languages are processed in our brain.

In this master's work, I analysed a new problematic in order to understand the cognitive processes underlying code switching or code alternation in the speech of speakers of Senegalese origin living in Toulouse.

Can you tell me how many languages the speaker used in this sentence?

M.Tr.                  123.          …+ bu ñu changer le nom dooga ñów ci liggéey boobu + moment bu mois de mars moo subvention estatal mooy comunidad autonoma + avec les fondations avec les_Associations + donc: loolu amu ñu moyen bi ndax Espagne dafa ngand dafa yaatu  + buy dem ki bi + c’est un billet c’est tout le da ngay voyager c’est 400 auros c’est 30 auros c’est cinq cent auros …

Subject: 

Cognitive analysis of the switching code in the narrative oral production of Speakers of Senegalese origin

Abstract: This work contributes to understand the plurilingual speech. More precisely, a little case not studied at all, namely the bilingual speech of Senegalese migrants in Toulouse. These speakers have been used in Senegal a bilingual speech, Wolof-French (the so-called "Wolof-urban"), which was spread in Senegal after the independence within the imposition of the French language as the country's official language to the detriment of national or regional languages (wolof, serere, haalpulaar, diola...). These languages coexist with French in a multilingual and diglossic context. From a cognitive point of view, oral production is a complex task, responding to a communication intention determined, among other things, by our knowledge of the world, discursive genres and by the mastery of languages. For this research, we have compiled a corpus of oral histories obtained from a silent short film (Charlie Chaplin's modern times), which has been viewed and then was narrated orally by Senegalese speakers, for whom French and Wolof usually conform to bilingual language. The study is conducted to investigate the types of code switching (cs) for the purpose of discovering a few rules shared by different speakers in their different utterance. The control process model of code switching   has been studied in case of alternance cs, insertion cs and dense cs in a psycholinguistic and a sociolinguistic process. Finally, we analysed the processes of language activation and inhibition summoned by different speakers in their discourse statement?

Keywords: bilingualism, proficiency and bilingual speaking; code switching, first and second language, activation; inhibition.

It is necessary to lift the scepticism of bilingualism, it is not and will not be the origin of language disorders.

Paradis, M. (2004). A neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism (Studies in bilingualism 18). Amsterdam [etc.: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

[codeswitching]

The last hypothesis (Subsystems) defended by Paradis (2004) shows that the underlying systems of languages in our brain share processes and treatments that are part of the language system.  This implies that we have in our brain two languages with similar processing. Each language constitutes a subsystem that is functionally independent because the elements that belong to the same language are strongly related, and it is easier to encode two lexical constituents that are semantically close in a process of comprehension or production in one language.

[codeswitching]

This representational model of oral production fits the creative pattern of the code-switching process in their discourse strategy (Green & Wei, 2014). It has described a fairly comprehensive model of inhibitory control in language production.

[codeswitching]

Study of English in a French-English bilingual preschool in Senegal.

De Houwer, A. (2009). Bilingual first language acquisition (MM textbooks). Bristol Buffalo (N.Y.) Toronto: Multilingual Matters.