Malayalam-Kannada Code-mixing

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a pilot study undertaken to see the possible limits of code-mixing among Malayalam-Kannada bilinguals in a syntactic context of featural mismatch. The results of the study reiterate that the fact that despite being influenced by psycholinguistic factors like being primed with the language of the task paragraph, simultaneous (balanced) bilinguals can make the choice of strategy based on structural factors, but sequential bilinguals do not access syntactic structure while making these decisions. The latter’s choice of strategy is based either on the acquisitional factor of MT/non-MT or on psycholinguistic factors from the task design.