A Study Of Asymmetric Effect In The Code-switching Process Of Chinese-Japanese Bilinguals With Different Proficiency Levels

In psycholinguistics,the process of a bilingual switches between two or more languages is called code-switching.In this process,bilinguals sometimes have a prolonged response and a decrease in the accuracy rate because of the influence of the code-switching cost.Moreover,the bilingual's reaction time between the first language and the second language is different,which is called the asymmetry of the code-switching.At present,according to the research results of domestic and foreign scholars,it can be found that the generation of asymmetry in code-switching is controversial.Some scholars believe that it is related to the central control mechanism,while others think that it is related to the second language proficiency,second language learning style,and second language acquisition age;Throughout these studies,it is not difficult to find that most of the research concentrated on the Indo-European language family.The research on cross-language aspect is relatively rare,and they mainly focus on Chinese-English bilingual.On the other hand,there is a particularity in Japanese itself,and its language family is still under debate.Japanese Kanji is also closely related to Chinese character.And the studies at phrase level are relatively rare.Therefore,this study expects to adopt the cross-language initiation paradigm through experiments to study the code-switching of Han-Japanese bilinguals with different proficiency.The research questions in this paper are as follows:(1)What kind of code-switching cost exist among bilinguals with high proficiency(both in Chinese to Japanese and Japanese to Chinese.)?(2)What kind of code-switching cost exist among bilinguals with low proficiency(both in Chinese to Japanese and Japanese to Chinese.)?(3)Does language proficiency level affect code-switching process?(4)Does language structural order affect code-switching process?Aiming at investigating the asymmetric effects of code-switching process of Chinese-Japanese bilinguals with different proficiency level,a 2×2 mixed design is adopted in this thesis(verb-object phrase naming task/quantifier phrase naming task)×(bilinguals with high proficiency/bilinguals with low proficiency).After the experiment,all valid data were collected and put into SPSS 22.0 for analyzing And the results are as follows:(1)Highly proficient Chinese-Japanese bilinguals have almost no code-switching asymmetry in code-switching at the phrase level: the switching cost of the proficient language(Chinese)is almost equal to switching cost of the relatively proficient language(Japanese).(2)Low proficiency Chinese-Japanese bilinguals have asymmetry in code-switching at the phrase level: the cost of switching to a proficient language(Chinese)is longer than the cost of switching to the unskilled language(Japanese).(3)Language proficiency has an impact on the code-switching process at phrase level,which is reflected in the fact that the high proficiency Chinese-Japanese bilinguals have a significantly lower switching cost in the Japanese naming task than the low proficiency Chinese-Japanese bilingual.(4)The difference between the grammatical structure of the native language and the second language affects the code-switching process at phrase level,but the effect on the cost of code-switching is not statistically significant.