Please join us in Cobb Hall 115 on Friday, October 13 at 3:30 PM for the first LVC of the year, hosted with our sister workshop Language Evolution and Processing! Dr. Matthew Goldrick, Professor of Linguistics and Psychology at Northwestern University, will be talking about the cognitive mechanisms of code-switching. This week we will also have a Zoom option, so if you are unable to join us in-person, please reach out to the LVC coordinators for the link.

Mechanisms of language control at multiple levels of linguistic structure

Multilingual speakers have the amazing capacity to shift between quite different codes for communication. What cognitive mechanisms allow speakers to fluently produce an intended language, even when one language is much more difficult to access than another? I’ll discuss data from experiments eliciting isolated words and connected speech from bilingual speakers that suggests lexical inhibition– a temporary reduction in the accessibility of lexical items in the easier-to-access language – plays a key role in allowing bilinguals to fluently shift languages. I’ll then discuss phonetic data suggesting that different mechanisms may be at play in the processing of sound structure.