Expecting the unexpected: Code-switching as a facilitatory cue in online sentence processing

Abstract Despite its prominent use among bilinguals, psycholinguistic studies reported code-switch processing costs (e.g., Meuter & Allport, 1999). This paradox may partly be due to the focus on itself instead of potential subsequent benefits. Motivated by corpus CS patterns and sociopragmatic functions CS, we asked whether bilinguals code-switches as a cue lexical characteristics upcoming speech. We report visual world study testing code-switching facilitates anticipation lower-frequency words. Results confirm that US Spanish–English (n = 30) minority (Spanish) majority (English) language in real-time less frequent word would ensue, indexed increased looks at images representing lower- vs. higher-frequency words code-switched condition, prior target onset. These results highlight need further integrate sociolinguistic observations into experimental code-switching.