Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

Like… Immersion Matters: Learning English-Specific Discourse Marker Use in Mandarin-English Bilinguals from China

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Chenke Wei¹ (ckwei@ucdavis.edu), Katie Sendek, Tamara Swaab; ¹Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Lab

This study investigates how immersion in an English-speaking environment influences the use of English-specific discourse markers (DMs)—words like “well,” “you know,” and “like” that connect ideas and manage social interactions—by Mandarin-English bilinguals. These markers play distinct roles in English, often lacking direct equivalents in Mandarin, presenting unique challenges for bilingual speakers to master both their grammatical and pragmatic functions. Mandarin-English bilingual students at UC Davis were divided into two groups: those recently immersed in English (fewer than 12 months) and those with over two years of immersion. Speech samples were collected through interviews and storytelling tasks and analyzed for DM usage, grammatical accuracy, and cohesive structure. Using AI-based transcription tools and statistical analyses, including ANOVAs and Principal Component Analysis (PCA), the study revealed that longer immersion significantly increased DM usage. However, this improvement did not correspond to reductions in grammatical errors, suggesting that these require more extended exposure to nuanced social and linguistic contexts. To deepen these insights, follow-up experiments will employ Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to explore the neural processes underlying the use of English DMs. The N400 (semantic processing) and P600 (reanalysis) will be measured to examine how bilinguals process and adapt to DMs in English versus Mandarin contexts. By investigating how neural responses change with immersion duration, this study aims to elucidate how bilinguals' brains navigate language-specific pragmatic challenges, contributing to our understanding of second-language learning and bilingual adaptation.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Lexicon