In three experiments, using the auditory moving window task, bilinguals
operating in single (English) or dual (Spanish and English) language
communities listened to successive sound segments of sentences presented
one at a time. In Experiments 1a-b, sentences were in Spanish and the
critical target was either a code-switch
(|’pik(ə)ls|) or a borrowing, in which
an English target was pronounced in Spanish
(|pikos|). Experiments 2a-b compared
code-switched versus non-switched targets within Spanish sentences.
Experiment 3 used sentences in English and critical targets were in
Spanish. Context (low/high constraint) and word frequency (low/high)
were manipulated. Results for Experiments 1a-b revealed that
code-switches took longer to process than borrowings. Taken together,
findings from the three experiments suggested that code-switched
language results in a processing cost in which the bilingual’s
linguistic system demands more memory and time to successfully integrate
the code-switched information into the sentence. Word frequency and
context, as predicted by the featural restriction model, affected
the processing of the code-switched targets.