Language switching and constituent structure

Four experiments were performed to investigate the functioning of constituents as perceptual units and the independence of the two languages used by bilinguals. Two groups of bilinguals, Korean-English and Spanish-English, and two modalities of presentation, visual and auditory, were used. Split-language sentences were presented to bilingual subjects. The point in the sentence at which the language transition occurred was varied. One group was asked to respond "true" or "false" to sentences in which the switch in language occurred between constituents. Another group was asked to respond to sentences in which the language switch occurred within one of the constituents. Longer response times resulted from sentences in which the language switch occurred within a constituent. Results supported the position that major constituents define units which function in perception of sentences and that, in decoding, the two languages used by bilinguals are functionally distinct.