Jorge Valdés Kroff

• PhD in Hispanic Linguistics and Language Sciences
• Professor (Associate) at University of Florida

Code-switching, here defined as the use of two languages within a single sentence, has been hypothesized to engage cognitive control such as inhibition and conflict monitoring. The current project investigates whether structurally distinct types of code-switching engage cognitive control differently. We tested this in a conflict adaptation paradigm...

In emotionally neutral situations, bilinguals use code-switching as a politeness strategy to mitigate the emotional and social impact of taboo words, by distancing themselves from taboo concepts and/or warning interlocutors of upcoming taboo content. This study investigates whether bilinguals are sensitive to this pattern in comprehension, i.e., wh...

In our increasingly multilingual modern world, understanding how languages beyond the first are acquired and processed at a brain level is essential to design evidence-based teaching, clinical interventions and language policy. Written by a team of world-leading experts in a wide range of disciplines within cognitive science, this Handbook provides...

Bilinguals experience processing costs when comprehending code-switches, yet the magnitude of the cost fluctuates depending on numerous factors. We tested whether switch costs vary based on the frequency of different types of code-switches, as estimated from natural corpora of bilingual speech and text. Spanish–English bilinguals in the U.S. read s...

One universal characteristic of human languages is grammatical agreement dependencies. In Mandarin Chinese, classifiers, or measure words, are an obligatory grammatical class used to characterize a quantified noun. The classifier is inserted in between the numeral and the noun (i.e., 一张票 yī zhāng piào, one ticket). English lacks classifiers, so the...

Monolinguals use various linguistic phenomena to guide prediction while comprehending. For bilinguals, the richer linguistic landscape provides additional resources. Code-switches (CS) are a particularly salient event which could play a role in bilingual prediction. Despite their ubiquity and diverse functions, experimental research has focused on...

Despite its prominent use among bilinguals, psycholinguistic studies reported code-switch processing costs (e.g., Meuter & Allport, 1999). This paradox may partly be due to the focus on the code-switch itself instead of its potential subsequent benefits. Motivated by corpus studies on CS patterns and sociopragmatic functions of CS, we asked whether...

The study of how bilingualism is linked to cognitive processing, including executive functioning, has historically focused on comparing bilinguals to monolinguals across a range of tasks. These group comparisons presume to capture relatively stable cognitive traits and have revealed important insights about the architecture of the language processi...

Despite its prominent use among bilinguals, psycholinguistic studies reported code-switch processing costs (e.g., Meuter & Allport, 1999). This paradox may partly be due to the focus on the code-switch itself instead of its potential subsequent benefits. Motivated by corpus studies on CS patterns and sociopragmatic functions of CS, we asked whether...

Prior studies using the event-related potential (ERP) technique show that integrating sentential code-switches during online processing leads to a broadly distributed late positivity component (LPC), while processing semantically unexpected continuations instead leads to the emergence of an N400 effect. While the N400 is generally assumed to index...

Spanish–English bilinguals rarely code-switch in the perfect structure between the Spanish auxiliary haber (“to have”) and the participle (e.g., “ Ella ha voted”; “She has voted”). However, they are somewhat likely to switch in the progressive structure between the Spanish auxiliary estar (“to be”) and the participle (“ Ella está voting”; “She is v...

Code-switching is highly socially constrained. For instance, code-switching is only felicitous when those present are fluent in both languages. This means that bilinguals need to dynamically adjust their language control and expectation of code-switching to the current social situation or context. The aim of the present EEG study was to investigate...

Prior studies using the event-related potential (ERP) technique show that integrating sentential code-switches in online processing lead to a broadly distributed late positivity component while processing semantically unexpected continuations instead lead to the emergence of an N400 effect. While the N400 is generally assumed to index lexico-semant...

The write-up of the study exploring the role of code-switching on prediction in subsequent speech. We find using the Visual World paradigm that a preceding L1-L2 CS can alert bilingual listeners that a less frequent word is coming up even before the word onset. We discuss the implications of the discovery for the study of code-switching.

The poster presented at AMLaP 2019 presents preliminary research from the study using eye-tracking while reading to ascertain the effects of CS on the processing of taboo words. Following our predictions, the trends in the early eye-tracking measures of the preliminary data point to balanced bilinguals using CS as a cue that a more emotional word i...

The aim of this study is to determine whether Spanish-like gender agreement causes interference in speakers of Papiamentu (a Western Romance-lexified creole language) who also speak Spanish. Papiamentu and Spanish are highly cognate languages in terms of their lexicons. However, Papiamentu lacks grammatical gender assignment and agreement, leading...

We investigated whether bilinguals' integration of a code-switch during real-time comprehension, which involves resolving among conflicting linguistic representations, modulates the deployment of cognitive-control mechanisms. In the current experiment, Spanish-English bilinguals (N = 48) completed a cross-task conflict-adaptation paradigm that test...

Multilingual speakers are able to switch from one language to the other ("code-switch'') between or within sentences. Because the underlying cognitive mechanisms are not well understood, in this study we use computational cognitive modeling to shed light on the process of code-switching.We employed the Bilingual Dual-path model, a Recurrent Neural...

This chapter discusses recent findings that demonstrate how variability in the linguistic experiences of bilingual speakers and in the ability of bilingual speakers to learn from these experiences, might impact bilingual language processing. It shows that linguistic experience and the interactional contexts in which bilinguals find themselves serve...

Durations of looks (in ms, cumulative) by 25 bilingual participants to the target images representing high (H) vs. low (L) frequency words, after audio instructions in Spanish (S) vs. audio instructions containing a code-switch from Spanish to English (CS), 300 ms before the onset of the word. In tentative support of our hypothesis, there are more...

Multilingual speakers are able to switch from one language to the other (“code-switch”) between or within sentences. Because the underlying cognitive mechanisms are not well understood, in this study we use computational cognitive modeling to shed light on the process of code-switching. We employed the Bilingual Dual-path model, a Recurrent Neural...

The graph shows durations of fixations of 17 bilinguals on the Low vs. High frequency pictures in the Code-switch and Spanish condition, from the onset of the code-switch, or the equivalent point in monolingual instructions, up until the 1000 ms mark (average target onset = 940 ms). The looks toward the Low frequency items significantly increase be...

Variation in the ways by which an individual processes codeswitched language may reveal fundamental dynamics of the language system that are otherwise obscured under unilingual conditions. Despite this, an important aspect that has been largely neglected in the field is the role of the bilingual experience in language processing. Drawing on corpus-...

Recent findings indicate that native speakers (L1) use grammatical gender marking on articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns (e.g., Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2007; Dussias, Valdés Kroff, Guzzardo Tamargo, & Gerfen, 2013). Conversely, adult second language (L2) learners for whom grammatical gender is absent in their first language appe...

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions The goal of this study is to determine if the way in which codemixed sentences are presented during experimental lab sessions affects the way they are processed, and how experimental design approximates (or not) patterns of language use in bilingual populations. Design/methodology/approach An eye-trac...

In the world today, bilingualism is more common than monolingualism. Thus, the default mental lexicon may in fact be the bilingual lexicon. More than ever, social and technological innovation have created a situation in which lexical knowledge may change dramatically throughout an individual’s lifetime. This book offers a new perspective for the un...

Through the use of the visual world paradigm and eye tracking, we investigate how orthographic–phonological mappings in bilinguals promote interference during spoken language comprehension. Eighteen English-dominant bilinguals and 13 Spanish-dominant bilinguals viewed 4-picture visual displays while listening to Spanish-only auditory sentences (e.g...

This volume offers a multidisciplinary view of cutting-edge research on bilingualism in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions, with the aim of building a bridge between sub-fields and approaches that often find themselves isolated from one another. The thirteen contributions in this volume offer a glimpse of the diversity of bilingualism present...

Researchers who study code-switching using lab-based approaches face a series of methodological challenges; these include, but are not limited to, using adequate techniques and tasks that allow for processing that reflects real-language usage and selecting stimuli that reflect the participants’ code-switching community norms. We present two illustr...

This volume provides a sample of the most recent studies on Spanish-English codeswitching both in the Caribbean and among bilinguals in the United States. In thirteen chapters, it brings together the work of leading scholars representing diverse disciplinary perspectives within linguistics, including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, theoretical...

This Special Collection includes a number of articles published together on the topic of Psycholinguistics and Variation and identified by the keyword “PsychLingVar” The collection reflects our view that variation in language processing is both important and ubiquitous, and that such variation presents challenges that psycholinguists have long igno...

We investigate the ‘gender-congruency’ effect during a spoken-word recognition task using the visual world paradigm. Eye movements of Italian-Spanish bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals were monitored while they viewed a pair of objects on a computer screen. Participants listened to instructions in Spanish (encuentra la bufanda / ‘find the scarf’)...

Using code-switching as a tool to illustrate how language experience modulates comprehension, the visual world paradigm was employed to examine the extent to which gender-marked Spanish determiners facilitate upcoming target nouns in a group of Spanish-English bilingual code-switchers. The first experiment tested target Spanish nouns embedded in a...

We employ code-switching (the alternation of two languages in bilingual communication) to test the hypothesis, derived from experience-based models of processing (e.g., Boland, Tanenhaus, Carlson, & Garnsey, 1989; Gennari & MacDonald, 2009), that bilinguals are sensitive to the combinatorial distributional patterns derived from production and that...

In a recent study, Lew-Williams and Fernald (2007) showed that native Spanish speakers use grammatical gender information encoded in Spanish articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns. In this article, we report the results of a study investigating whether grammatical gender facilitates noun recognition during second language (L2) proc...

Psycholinguistics has traditionally focused on language processing in monolingual speakers. In the past two decades, there has been a dramatic increase of research on bilingual speakers, recognizing that bilingualism is not an unusual or problematic circumstance but one that characterizes more language speakers in the world than monolingualism. Mos...

Reviews the book, The Cambridge handbook of linguistic code-switching edited by Barbara E. Bullock and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio (see record 2009-06438-000 ). A good indicator that an emerging area of study is gaining importance in the research community is the publication of a handbook that unites leading scholars in that area to provide a broad...