Cover not available

Article In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism: Online-First Articles

Code-switching burstiness in bilingual speech

ORCiD logo with link | The Pennsylvania State University
ORCiD logo with link | The Pennsylvania State University
ORCiD logo with link | The Pennsylvania State University
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
Reliably characterizing bilingual ecologies and developing models of language activation requires metrics for code-switching (CS). This study charts the time course of CS, plotting multi-word switches by intervening distance, using Intonation Units (prosodic speech chunks) as the token level. Drawing on a community in which CS is an ingroup discourse mode, three datasets of bilingual speech are compared. The datasets were chosen to differ in the proportions of the two languages (from balanced to skewed) and the proportion of switch points (from under .05 to over .15). Despite differences in language distribution and CS frequency, CS appears bursty: clusters of activity interspersed between longer unilingual stretches. This intrinsic burstiness indicates that ‘dense CS’ is dense successions of instances separated by long gaps. If parallel activation of two languages fluctuates regardless of situational context, then rather than moving into and out of bilingual mode, bilinguals may move along a fluctuating bilingual mode.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Code-switching metrics
    • 2.1The Intonation Unit (IU) as a basic delimiter of code-switching
    • 2.2Multi-word strings as the proper domain for CS burstiness metrics
  • 3.Data
    • 3.1Bilingual community and corpus
    • 3.2Internally generated CS as a discourse mode
  • 4.Comparing three bilingual datasets: Language distribution and CS frequency metrics
  • 5.CS burstiness
    • 5.1Burstiness as an independent code-switching metric
    • 5.2Code-switching burstiness visualized as distance from preceding and following occurrence
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Methodological implications of CS burstiness for stimuli presentation
    • 6.2Burstiness vs. priming
    • 6.3Parallel activation and cognitive control
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Data availability
  • CRediT author contributions
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
References (81)
References
Aaron, J. E. (2015). Lone English-origin nouns in Spanish: The precedence of community norms. International Journal of Bilingualism, 19(4), 459–480. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Adamou, E., & Shen, X. R. (2017). There are no language switching costs when codeswitching is frequent. International Journal of Bilingualism, 23(1), 53–70. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Altmann, E. G., Pierrehumbert, J. B., & Motter, A. E. (2009). Beyond word frequency: Bursts, lulls, and scaling in the temporal distributions of words. PLoS ONE, 4(11), Article e7678. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Auer, P. (1995). The pragmatics of code-switching: A sequential approach. In L. Milroy & P. Muysken (Eds.), One speaker, two languages: Cross disciplinary perspectives on code switching (pp. 115–135). Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Backus, A. (1992). Patterns of language mixing: A study in Turkish–Dutch bilingualism. Otto Harrassowitz.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ball, F. G., Milne, R. K., & Yeo, G. F. (2004). A unified approach to burst properties of multiconductance single ion channels. Mathematical Medicine and Biology: A Journal of the IMA, 21(3), 205–245. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barnett, R., Codó, E., Eppler, E., Forcadell, M., Gardner-Chloros, P., van Hout, R., Moyer, M., Torras, M. C., Turell, M. T., Sebba, M., Starren, M., & Wensing, S. (2000). The LIDES Coding Manual: A document for preparing and analyzing language interaction data Version 1.1 — July, 1999. International Journal of Bilingualism, 4(2), 131–132. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bullock, B. E., Guzmán, G., Serigos, J., & Toribio, A. J. (2018). Should code-switching models be asymmetric? Interspeech 2018: Proceedings of the 19th annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 2534–2538). International Speech Communication Association. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bybee, J. (2023). What is usage-based linguistics? In M. Díaz-Campos & S. Balasch (Eds.), The handbook of usage-based linguistics (pp. 9–29). John Wiley & Sons. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cameron-Faulkner, T., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2003). A construction based analysis of child directed speech. Cognitive Science, 27(6), 843–873. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chafe, W. (1994). Discourse, consciousness and time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Costa, A., Caramazza, A., & Sebastian-Galles, N. (2000). The cognate facilitation effect: Implications for the model of lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26(5), 1283–1296.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Croft, W. (1995). Intonation units and grammatical structure. Linguistics, 33(5), 839–882. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dell, G. S. (1986). A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. Psychological Review, 93(3), 283–321. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
DeSalvio, N. D., Fan, W., Barbour, A. J., & Hardebeck, J. L. (2026). Compact seismicity bursts have different characteristics from regional seismicity. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 131(3), Article e2025JB032917. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Du Bois, J. W., Schuetze-Coburn, S., Cumming, S., & Paolino, D. (1993). Outline of discourse transcription. In J. A. Edwards & M. D. Lampert (Eds.), Talking data: Transcription and coding in discourse research (pp. 45–89). Psychology Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dussias, P. E., & Sagarra, N. (2007). The effect of exposure on syntactic parsing in Spanish–English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10(1), 101–116. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ellison, T. M., & Si, A. (2021). A quantitative analysis of age-related differences in Hindi–English code-switching. International Journal of Bilingualism, 25(6), 1510–1528. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fricke, M., & Kootstra, G. J. (2016). Primed codeswitching in spontaneous bilingual dialogue. Journal of Memory and Language, 91, 181–201. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fricke, M., Kroll, J. F., & Dussias, P. E. (2016). Phonetic variation in bilingual speech: A lens for studying the production–comprehension link, Journal of Memory and Language, 89, 110–137. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goh, K. I., & Barabási, A. L. (2008). Burstiness and memory in complex systems. Europhysics Letters, 81(4), Article 48002. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gonzales, M. D. (1999). Crossing social and cultural borders: The road to language hybridity. In L. Galindo & M. D. Gonzales (Eds.), Speaking Chicana: Voice, power, and identity (pp. 13–38). University of Arizona Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Green, D. W. (1998). Mental control of the bilingual lexico-semantic system. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1(1), 67–81. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2011). Language control in different contexts: The behavioral ecology of bilingual speakers. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, Article 103. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Green, D. W., & Abutalebi, J. (2013). Language control in bilinguals: The adaptive control hypothesis. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 25(5), 515–530. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Green, D. W., & Li, W. (2014). A control process model of code-switching. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29(4), 499–511. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, S. T. (2005). Syntactic priming: A corpus-based approach. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 34(4), 365–399. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, S. T., & Kootstra, G. J. (2017). Structural priming within and across languages: A corpus-based perspective. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(2), 235–250. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grosjean, F. (1998). Studying bilinguals: Methodological and conceptual issues. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1(2), 131–149. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gullberg, M., Indefrey, P., & Muysken, P. (2009). Research techniques for the study of code-switching. In B. E. Bullock & A. J. Toribio (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of linguistic code-switching (pp. 21–39). Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gumperz, J. J. (1976/1982). Conversational code-switching. In J. J. Gumperz (Ed.), Discourse strategies (pp. 59–99). Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Guzmán, G., Ricard, J., Serigos, J., Bullock, B. E., & Toribio, A. J. (2017). Metrics for modeling code-switching across corpora. Interspeech 2017: Proceedings of the 18th annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 67–71). International Speech Communication Association. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Han, X., Li, W., & Filippi, R. (2024). Modulating bilingual language production and cognitive control: How bilingual language experience matters. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 28(1), 120–134. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Helasvuo, M.-L. (2020). The noun phrase as an emergent unit in Finnish. In T. Ono & S. A. Thompson (Eds.), The ‘Noun Phrase’ across languages: An emergent unit in interaction (pp. 71–92). John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Helms-Park, R., & Dronjic, V. (2016). Crosslinguistic lexical influence: Cognate facilitation. In R. Alonso Alonso (Ed.), Crosslinguistic influence in second language acquisition (pp. 71–92). Multilingual Matters. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hilpert, M., & Correia Saavedra, D. (2017). Why are grammatical elements more evenly dispersed than lexical elements? Assessing the roles of text frequency and semantic generality. Corpora, 12(3), 369–392. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Himmelmann, N. P. (2022). Prosodic phrasing and the emergence of phrase structure. Linguistics, 60(3), 715–743. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hwang, H., Shin, J.-A., & Hartsuiker, R. J. (2017). Late bilinguals share syntax unsparingly between L1 and L2: Evidence from crosslinguistically similar and different constructions. Language Learning, 68(1), 177–205. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Inbar, M., Genzer, S., Perry, S., Grossman, E., & Landau, A. N. (2023). Intonation units in spontaneous speech evoke a neural response. Journal of Neuroscience, 43(48), 8189–8200. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Inbar, M., Grossman, E., & Landau, A. N. (2025). A universal of speech timing: Intonation units form low-frequency rhythms. PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(34), Article e2425166122. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jaeger, F., & Snider, N. (2013). Alignment as a consequence of expectation adaptation: Syntactic priming is affected by the prime’s prediction error given both prior and recent experience. Cognition, 127(1), 57–83. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Johns, M. A., & Steuck, J. (2021). Is codeswitching easy or difficult? Testing processing cost through the prosodic structure of bilingual speech. Cognition, 211, Article 104634. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Johns, M. A., Valdés Kroff, J. R., & Dussias, P. E. (2019). Mixing things up: How blocking and mixing affect the processing of codemixed sentences. International Journal of Bilingualism, 23(2), 584–611. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Karsai, M., Kaski, K., Barabási, A.-L., & Kertész, J. (2012). Universal features of correlated bursty behaviour. Scientific Reports, 2(1), Article 397. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kim, E.-K., & Jo, H.-H. (2016). Measuring burstiness for finite event sequences. Physical Review E, 94(3), Article 032311. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kootstra, G. J., Dijkstra, T., & van Hell, J. G. (2020). Interactive alignment and lexical triggering of code-switching in bilingual dialogue. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, Article 1747. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kroll, J. F., Bobb, S. C., & Hoshino, N. (2014). Two languages in mind: Bilingualism as a tool to investigate language, cognition, and the brain. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(3), 159–163. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kroll, J. F., Bobb, S. C., & Wodniecka, Z. (2006). Language selectivity is the exception, not the rule: Arguments against a fixed locus of language selection in bilingual speech. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9(2), 119–135. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1984). Field methods of the project on linguistic change and variation. In J. Baugh & J. Sherzer (Eds.), Language in use: Readings in sociolinguistics (pp. 28–53). Prentice Hall.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Labov, W., & Sankoff, G. (2023). Conversations with strangers. Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
LaCasse, D., Torres Cacoullos, R., & Trawick, S. (2021, October 22–24). Language choice: Do bilinguals align with each other? [Poster presentation]. NWAV 49: New Ways of Analyzing Variation 49, Austin, TX, United States.
Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22(1), 1–38. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Loebell, H., & Bock, K. (2003). Structural priming across languages. Linguistics, 41(5), 791–824. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meuter, R. F. I., & Allport, A. (1999). Bilingual language switching in naming: Asymmetrical costs of language selection. Journal of Memory and Language, 40(1), 25–40. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Muysken, P. (2000). Bilingual speech: A typology of code-mixing. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ness, T., Langlois, V. J., Kim, A. E., & Novick, J. M. (2025). The state of cognitive control in language processing. Perspectives in Psychological Science, 20(2), 219–240. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pattichis, R., LaCasse, D., & Torres Cacoullos, R. (2026). Re-evaluating the word token for bilingual speech processing: The case for Intonation Units. Computational Linguistics, 52(1), 271–293. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pattichis, R., LaCasse, D., Trawick, S., & Torres Cacoullos, R. (2023). Code-switching metrics using Intonation Units. In H. Bouamor, J. Pino, & K. Bali (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 16840–16849). Association for Computational Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pfaff, C. W. (1979). Constraints on language mixing: Intrasentential code-switching and borrowing in Spanish/English. Language, 55(2), 291–318. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, J. B. (2012). Burstiness of verbs and derived nouns. In D. Santos, K. Lindén, & W. Ng’ang’a (Eds.), Shall we play the festschrift game? Essays on the occasion of Lauri Carlson’s 60th birthday (pp. 99–115). Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Poplack, S. (1980). Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español: Toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics, 18(7–8), 581–618. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1993). Variation theory and language contact: Concepts, methods and data. In D. R. Preston (Ed.), American dialect research (pp. 251–286). John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2012). What does the Nonce Borrowing Hypothesis hypothesize? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15(3), 644–648. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2015). Code switching: Linguistic. In J. Wright (Ed.), International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences (2nd ed., Vol. 3, pp. 918–925). Elsevier. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2018). Borrowing: Loanwords in the speech community and in the grammar. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Roelofs, A. (1992). A spreading-activation theory of lemma retrieval in speaking. Cognition, 42(1–3), 107–142. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ross, S. M. (2014). Introduction to probability models (11th ed.). Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sankoff, D. (1998). A formal production-based explanation of the facts of code-switching. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1(1), 39–50. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sankoff, D., & Poplack, S. (1981). A formal grammar for code-switching. Papers in Linguistics: International Journal of Human Communication, 14(1), 3–45. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schwartz, A. I., Kroll, J. F., & Diaz, M. (2007). Reading words in Spanish and English: Mapping orthography to phonology in two languages. Language and Cognitive Processes, 22(1), 106–129. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Solorio, T., & Liu, Y. (2008). Learning to predict code-switching points. In M. Lapata & H. T. Ng (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 973–981). Association for Computational Linguistics. [URL].
Torres Cacoullos, R. (2020). Code-switching strategies: Prosody and syntax. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, Article 2130. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, R., & Travis, C. E. (2018). Bilingualism in the community: Code-switching and grammars in contact. Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2020). Code-switching and bilinguals’ grammars. In E. Adamou & Y. Matras (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of language contact (pp. 252–275). Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, R., & Vélez-Avilés, J. (2024). Mixing adjectives: A variable equivalence hypothesis for bilingual word order conflicts. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 14(5), 609–639. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Travis, C. E., Torres Cacoullos, R., & Kidd, E. (2017). Cross-language priming: A view from bilingual speech. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(2), 283–298. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Trawick, S. (2022). Revisiting the concept of triggering of code-switching [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Pennsylvania State University.
van Hell, J. G., Litcofsky, K. A., Ting, C. Y. (2015). Intra-sentential code-switching: Cognitive and neural approaches. In J. W. Schwieter (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of bilingual processing (pp. 459–482). Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vázquez, A., Oliveira, J. G., Dezsö, Z., Goh, K.-I., Kondor, I., & Barabási, A.-L. (2006). Modeling bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics. Physical Review E, 73(3), Article 036127. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wilson, D. V., & Dumont, J. (2015). The emergent grammar of bilinguals: The Spanish verb hacer ‘do’ with a bare English infinitive. International Journal of Bilingualism, 19(4), 444–458. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 jbe-platform.quadraat-sans-bold jbe-platform.quadraat-sans-bold-dark jbe-platform.quadraat-sans-bold-light jbe-platform.quadraat-sans-bold prag Twitter_Logo_Blue