Prosodic Cues to Monolingual versus Code-switching Sentences in English and Spanish

Code-switching offers an interesting methodology to examine what happens when two linguistic systems come into contact. In the present study, two experiments were conducted to see if (1) listeners were able to anticipate code-switches in speech-innoise, and (2) prosodic cues were present in the signal as potential cues to an upcoming code-switch. A speech-in-noise perception experiment with early Spanish-English bilinguals found that listeners were indeed able to accurately identify words in code-switching sentences with the same accuracy as in monolingual sentences, even in highly-degraded listening conditions. We then analyzed the stimuli used in the perception experiment, and found that the speaker used different prosodic contours for code-switching productions compared to monolingual productions. We propose that listeners use specific code-switching prosody to anticipate code-switches, and thus ease processing costs in word identification.