Sensitivity to anticipatory phonetic cues in English-Arabic code switches

Bilingual speakers have a remarkable ability to juggle their two languages during speech production and speech perception. This is despite the fact that many psycholinguistic studies on code switching report a switch cost, i.e., increased processing demand. Recent research, however, suggests that listeners may be sensitive to anticipatory phonetic cues available in the speech signal leading up to a code switch to facilitate processing (e.g., Shen et al, 2020).

In this study, I aim to determine whether Arabic-English bilingual listeners are sensitive to these anticipatory phonetic cues to facilitate auditory comprehension by investigating if the presence or absence of these cues affects the processing speed of code switched words. 

An Arabic (L1) – English (L2) bilingual speaker recorded 240 monolingual English and 240 bilingual English-Arabic sentences, such that only the bilingual sentences could contain phonetic cues to code switching. The English and Arabic target words were then identity- or cross-spliced to create four conditions: 

(c1) English monolingual frame with English target word (congruent) 

(c2) English bilingual frame with a switch to Arabic (congruent) 

(c3) English monolingual frame with a switch to Arabic (incongruent) 

(c4) English bilingual frame with English target word (incongruent) 

Sixteen Arabic-English bilingual participants completed a concept monitoring task where they were instructed to press a button as soon as they heard the target word corresponding to the picture on the screen. 

The results of mixed effects regression models revealed that listeners were fastest in the two no-switch conditions, and slowest in the two switch conditions. Crucially, however, reaction times (RTs) were slower when there were incongruent phonetic cues before the target word in both switch and no-switch sentences. This suggests that Arabic-English bilingual listeners are able to rely on anticipatory phonetic cues in a switch sentence to speed up the processing of the code switched word.