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Effects of accent variation on Mandarin-English intrasentential code-switching perception using electroencephalography

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

Khushi Nilesh Patil1, Philip Monahan2; 1University of Toronto

Code-switching is the use of multiple languages in a single utterance and often results in “costs” observed in behavioral measures (Thomas & Allport, 2000; Costa & Santesteban, 2004; Olson, 2017). Anticipatory phonetic cues appear to reduce such costs (Fricke et. al, 2016; Shen et. al, 2020). The current study investigates whether speaker accent mitigates switch costs using event-related potentials (ERP) in EEG. Here, speaker accent provides natural, language-specific phonetic cues during sentence comprehension. Previous ERP findings on code-switching in the auditory modality report N400 and LPC effects (Fernandez et. al, 2019; Yacovone et. al, 2021). Foreign accents also modulate ERP responses to otherwise unexpected speech patterns in the syntactic domain (Hanulikova et. al, 2011); however, no published results (to our knowledge) examine how accent interacts with code-switching. To address this gap, we test Mandarin-English bilingual listeners in English-to-Mandarin code-switched sentences and unilingual English sentences that vary in the accent of the English (Canadian accented English vs. Mandarin accented English); for example, “I bought a shū bāo (backpack) for school” vs. “I bought a backpack for school”, in a Canadian or Mandarin accent. Given existing research, we expect N400 and LPC effects in code-switched sentences relative to unilingual sentences. Moreover, Mandarin-accented code-switched sentences will induce smaller N400 and LPC effects compared to Canadian-accented sentences, as listeners may use cues available in the Mandarin accent to anticipate the switch. This research provides insight into neurophysiological mechanisms underlying code-switching and deepens our understanding of phonetic variation and cross-linguistic interactions in the multilingual brain.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Other

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