A Psycholinguistic Perspective on Code-Switching

Essay in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, University of Babylon, language: English, abstract: The study aims to approach code-switching from a psycholinguistic perspective. It sets itself to shed light on the concepts, factors as contextual and syntactic ones, and models and some other important aspects as when does code-switching occur? And how does it occur? Language is a mean of communication that is used to convey thoughts, emotions, beliefs etc. One may come closer to grasp in which sense language relates to other cognitive faculties if he can understand the mechanisms of processing, decoding, storage, and production. The study deals with study code-switching from the psycholinguistics perspective. The definitions of the concept, its factors and models are included. Code-switching cannot be regarded as a universal phenomenon, since it is only widespread in some language communities. It is considered as psychological phenomenon whose causes are obviously extralinguistics, in other words code-switching does not occur only as a result of language use but by mental processes taking place in bilingual's place.