LingLunch édition spéciale

Édition spéciale, suivie d’un déjeuner.

A. Jaber (LLF/UPC), C. Branchini (Ca' Foscari University of Venice), B. Giustolisi (Università degli studi di Milano), C. Geraci (CNRS/ Jean Nicod), C. Donati (LLF/UPC)
A code blending advantage beyond the lexicon?

Bimodal bilinguals are individuals who are competent of two languages belonging to a sign language and a spoken language and have thus access to two largely independent articulatory channels. Their use of their two languages in production and comprehension makes them an ideal test bed for investigating the interaction of the two languages and the limits of their coactivation pace articulatory constraints. As for production, bimodal bilinguals prefer to code-blend (use fragments from both languages) rather than code-switch (Emmorey et al. 2008; Donati & Branchini 2013;16). What about comprehension? Emmorey et al. (2012) investigated hearing ASL-English bilinguals involved in a semantic categorization task with words produced either in English only, or in American Sign Language (ASL) only or simultaneously in the two languages. Results are that bimodal bilinguals answered faster in the bimodal condition when compared to the two unimodal input.

This important finding presents two limits: 1) it has only been shown for one language pair (ASL-English bilingualism) and 2) it does not extend beyond the lexical level.

This study aims at investigating whether 1) the lexical advantage of bimodal inputs is a general phenomenon beyond ASL/English 2) whether a similar effect can be observed at the clausal level. If so, does alignment between sign and speech (i.e., congruency) impact this effect? In order to answer these questions, we ran 4 experiments with two language pairs: French Sign Language (LSF)-French, which can be congruent since they are both SVO languages; and Italian Sign Language (LIS)-Italian, which are systematically incongruent since Italian is SVO while LIS is strictly SOV.