A psycholinguistic perspective on code-switching: Lexical, structural, and socio-interactive processes

Abstract This chapter provides a psycholinguistic perspective on code-switching. After a short overview of some basic notions on the psycholinguistics of bilingualism, a number of experimental studies are discussed in which socio-interactive, lexical, and structural processes in code-switching and bilingual language production were investigated in monologue and dialogue situations. As will be argued, the findings from these studies can be accounted for by means of the mechanisms of cross-language activation in the bilingual mind and interactive alignment in dialogue. This account emphasizes the bilingual mind as fundamentally interactive, in which cross-language activation within and between speakers can influence the tendency to code-switch as well as the grammatical form of a code-switched sentence. This way, it is possible to bridge sociolinguistic, structural, and psycholinguistic perspectives on code-switching, and to provide a more complete view on bilingual speech in general. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future research that go beyond the topic of code-switching.

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