This study by Sedarous (2023) investigates the processing of intrasentential code-switching among bilingual speakers, specifically focusing on how they handle congruent versus incongruent word orders. While previous research has primarily examined the grammaticality of code-switched utterances, this study shifts the focus to the cognitive mechanisms underlying bilinguals’ preferences for certain structures when switching languages, thereby expanding the understanding of bilingual language processing.

Utilizing a picture identification task, the research involved three bilingual groups (Arabic/English, Korean/English, and Spanish/English), where participants were presented with auditory sequences that varied in word order and code-switch location. The findings revealed that bilinguals processed congruent structures—those that aligned with their language’s canonical order—more efficiently than incongruent ones, indicating a preference for specific lexical items, particularly nouns, during online comprehension.

The results have significant theoretical implications for understanding bilingual parsing mechanisms and suggest that bilinguals employ a single parser for both single- and mixed-language expressions. Practically, these insights could inform language technology and translation studies by highlighting the importance of structural preferences in bilingual communication, potentially enhancing the design of algorithms for language processing tasks.

Source: glossa-journal.org