The effects of local and global alphabet context on code switching in word recognition

Abstract

It is often observed that switching between languages induces a processing cost. We investigated whether switching between two alphabets engenders an analogous cost. We used Serbian as the. testbed language as it can be written in two alphabets – Cyrillic and Roman. We presented 271 participants with a mixed-alphabet visual lexical decision task (VLD). All letter stings could be pronounced in two ways (bivalent). Half were interpretable as words in Roman (PETAK /petak/ meaning Friday, but meaningless in Cyrillic /retak/), and half were interpretable as words in Cyrillic (CAJAM /sajam/ meaning fair but meaningless in Roman/tsajam/). Prior to the mixed alphabet VLD, participants encountered an alphabet induction phase with instructions printed in either Roman or Cyrillic alphabet and a single-alphabet VLD. The (global) phonological ambiguity effect (Feldman & Turvey, 1983), i.e. the processing disadvantage for phonologically bivalent stimuli was observed for both words and pseudowords. In addition, for words, we observed a significant effect of local alphabet context and it was marginally modulated by the global alphabet context. We conclude by drawing parallels between code switching in bilingualism and bialphabetism.