by Rachel Elisabeth Negron
Tomorrow I will present my research proposal in our weekly seminars. Attached is the PowerPoint it will be based off of. Thanks for the comment Amelia. To answer your question, I will be presenting in Spanish though the PowerPoint is in English. The PowerPoint may seem a little confusing in –regards to how my experiment is set up– to those who are not familiar with it, so let me elaborate. My code-switching experiment consists of a 20 minute self-paced reading task. First there appears a whole sentence (in English) on the screen and then a sentence presented word-for-word (also in English), as demonstrated in the PowerPoint. The sentence that appears first and all at once is where the social contextual trigger is (something that is contextually related to the language -in this case Spanish–the participant will be switching to). In the word-for-word phrase, there will be a code-switch into Spanish (so there will appear one word in Spanish). Since the experiment is a self-paced reading task, using a button box, participants push a button in between every word of the word-for-word sentence. Therefore the button box can record the reaction time of the code-switch. The theory is that a social contextual trigger helps facilitate a code-switch, thus there should be a reduced reaction time recorded when reading the code-switch. I have added a few extra comprehension questions (yes/no questions) to the experiment to be sure the native Spanish-speaking participants are paying attention and can understand what they are reading! I also changed one of the social contextual triggers from 5 de Mayo to Semana Santa (since no Spaniard knows what 5 de Mayo is and every Spaniard knows what Semana Santa is)! Hopefully my explanation makes sense!Lexical_Triggering_and_&_CS.ppt