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Bilingual strategies from the perspective of a processing model

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 May 2013

ROBERT J. HARTSUIKER
ROBERT J. HARTSUIKER*
Affiliation:
Ghent UniversityRobert.Hartsuiker@ugent.be
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Extract

Muysken argues for four general “strategies” that characterize language contact phenomena across several levels of description. These strategies are (A) maximize structural coherence of the first language (L1); (B) maximize structural coherence of the second language (L2); (C) match between L1 and L2 patterns where possible; and (D) use universal language processing principles. These strategies are seen as choices that bilingual speakers make, individually and collectively, and that are influenced by multiple social, individual, and linguistic factors. This account has the clear advantage of unifying a seemingly very diverse set of language contact phenomena using a limited set of principles. One such phenomenon is cross-linguistic structural priming, the tendency of bilingual speakers to copy grammatical structures from a language recently used to another language (e.g., Hartsuiker, Pickering & Veltkamp, 2004), which Muysken considers an example of “bilingual interference”. In this domain, I will explore how these strategies can be realized in terms of a psycholinguistic processing model, and whether these strategies can be reduced to even more basic principles.

Type
Peer Commentaries
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 737 - 739
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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