Psychology: Fully Funded PhD Studentship in Resolving the Bilingualism Language Change Paradox

With Wales being a bilingual society, it is common for many people to use both Welsh and English when interacting with other people. When a bilingual is communicating with another person who speaks the same languages (e.g., Welsh and English), bilinguals switch languages interchangeably, often midsentence. The fact that bilinguals voluntarily switch when communicating appears at odds with much laboratory based research suggesting that switching language comes at a cognitive cost. Which begs the question: why do bilinguals choose to keep switching language types in conversation, despite apparent information processing inefficiencies? A phenomena we have dubbed the bilingual communication “paradox”. It is clear that understanding how and why people voluntarily switch languages remains a key issue in studying the bilingual experience – and evidence suggests such switching behaviour can be influenced by many different factors. This can include cues present in the context (e.g., visual information associated with one of the languages, de Bruin & Martin, 2022; Vaughan-Evans, 2023) as well as the language behaviour of the conversation partner (Kootstra et al., 2020). Currently, such emerging evidence has not been studied in detail with Welsh-English bilinguals, despite Welsh speakers being an ideal population for investigation. It is our view that Wales and Welsh speakers constitute an untapped ‘living laboratory’ of bilingualism research, and we are keen to demonstrate this untapped potential to the wider research world relevant to this topic. 

For the most part, the topics of language behaviour and language control in bilinguals have mostly been studied in artificial lab based experimental settings, for example, by asking bilinguals to name individual pictures without context and without interacting with another person. The proposed research project, therefore, aims to address two key questions by studying language choice and switching in more naturalistic bilingual contexts. First, it will examine how a bilingual’s language choice and behaviour is shaped by factors related to the bilingual themselves (such as their language preferences, age, regional location of origin and speed of lexical retrieval in each language) as well as by factors present in the context and medium of communication (such as overall language environment and behaviour of the conversation partner). Second, it will examine how bilinguals use their language control in these more naturalistic environments while using two languages (both in informal spoken and digital communication), and how their language control is influenced by the factors mentioned above. It is hoped that by understanding when and why language switching occurs for bilingual Welsh speakers, we can better inform both theories of how language processes function and feed into wider policy discussions. Moreover, we hope to continue to highlight the importance of Welsh populations to the global bilingualism research agenda. 

Overall, the proposed research will help to further develop our theoretical understanding of bilingual language production and language switching. It does this by studying these questions in more naturalistic contexts and in the important but understudied population of Welsh-English bilinguals. This will increase the inclusion of Welsh speakers in bilingualism research. Better understanding a bilingual’s communication patterns also has potential further societal consequences, including for bilingual education as well as for clinical language assessments in both children and older adults (e.g., early dementia assessment), which often only consider one language at a time and often do not consider how bilinguals use their languages in bilingual contexts.

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