JanetvanHell is professor of Psychology and Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University. She is also a co-director of the Center for Language Science. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In her Bilingualism and Language Development lab, and supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Dr. VanHell and her postdocs and students use neurocognitive and behavioral techniques to study the neural and cognitive mechanisms involved in language processing in children and adults. This includes the comprehension and production of code-switched sentences in bilinguals as well as the comprehension of foreign accented speech and dialectal variations. She also studies novel word learning and consolidation and patterns of cross-language interaction and transfer in child and adult second language learners at different levels of proficiency.
Code-Switching In Bilingual Speakers: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence
Current everyday communication is a cultural and linguistic melting pot. Many speakers of multiple languages regularly switch between languages, so comprehending code-switched speech is a common feature of everyday communication. In this talk, I will present recent psycholinguistic and electrophysiological studies that examined the cognitive and neural mechanisms associated with intra-sentential code-switching in production and comprehension. I will also discuss evidence showing that switching direction (switching from the first language to the second language, or vice versa) and accented speech modulate switching patterns when bilinguals read or listen to code-switched sentences. Together these studies attest to the value of integrating neurocognitive and linguistic approaches to gain more insight into the neural, cognitive, and linguistic mechanisms of intra-sentential code-switching in comprehension and production.
