The fundamental weakness of some of the major experimental tech-
niques in cognitive psychology and neuroscience is that they ignore
much of the time course of processing and the gradual accumulation of
partial information, focusing instead on the outcome of a cognitive
process rather than the dynamic properties of that process.
(53)The dynamic turn will lead to a rethinking of what is relevant in the study
of multilingual processing. The psycholinguistic research as it has evolved
over the last decade has become completely isolated from normal everyday
language use; it looks at isolated words or phrases, with a focus on ecologi-
cally invalid tasks with yes/no responses, without taking into account the
embodied and distributed nature of language use.
8.4 Code switching (CS) as language production
The second topic that will be considered from a CDST perspective is code
switching (CS). CS mostly refers to switching between languages, but it also
applies to dialects, and probably also styles and registers. When talking to
neighbors a different style is used than when talking to an official person, like
the mayor of the town. Essentially, switching registers is no different from
switching languages. In that sense, there are probably no real monolinguals,
since no one is completely monostylistic.
8.4.1 Sources of triggering in code switching^2
Decades of research have taught us a lot about why people code switch in
certain situations, but it is still largely unclear why particular instances of
code switching occur where they do. There is abundant evidence for general
effects of language proficiency, interactional setting, group affiliation, typo-
logical distance between languages and various other factors that affect global
patterns of CS. But how these general factors are related to actual switches is
unclear, and according to Sankoff(1998) it is not possible to predict each
and every switch:
Even if we can determine where a code-switch can occur and where it
cannot, there is no way of knowing in advance for any site whether a
switch will occur there or not. In particular, if a switch occurs at some
point in a sentence, this does not constrain any potential site(s) later in
the sentence either to contain another switch or not to–there areno
forced switches.
(39, italics in original)Still, we would want to know what the limits of this unpredictability are.
There may be real time factors that have a direct impact on the language
94 Trends III