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Insights into codeswitching from online communication: Effects of language preference and conditions arising from vocabulary richness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2021

Laurie Beth Feldman ,
Vidhushini Srinivasan ,
Rachel B. Fernandes Open the ORCID record for Rachel B. Fernandes [Opens in a new window]  and
Samira Shaikh
Laurie Beth Feldman*
Affiliation:
University at Albany, State University of New York, NY, USA
Vidhushini Srinivasan
Affiliation:
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Seattle, WA, USA
Rachel B. Fernandes
Affiliation:
University at Albany, State University of New York, NY, USA
Samira Shaikh
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Laurie Beth Feldman 1400 Washington Ave SS 399 Psychology Dept. Albany, NY12222[email protected]
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Abstract

Twitter data from a crisis that impacted many English–Spanish bilinguals show that the direction of codeswitches is associated with the statistically documented tendency of single speakers to prefer one language over another in their tweets, as gleaned from their tweeting history. Further, lexical diversity, a measure of vocabulary richness derived from information-theoretic measures of uncertainty in communication, is greater in proximity to a codeswitch than in productions remote from a switch. The prospects of a role for lexical diversity in characterizing the conditions for a language switch suggest that communicative precision may induce conditions that attenuate constraints against language mixing.

Keywords

bilingualismonline codeswitchingtweetslexical diversitylanguagepreferencelanguage proficiencytweeting historyvocabulary richness
Type
Research Notes
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , August 2021 , pp. 791 - 797
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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