Bilingual Prefabs: No Switching Cost Was Found in Cantonese–English Habitual Code-Switching in Hong Kong

Abstract

Previous studies on the comprehension of code-switched sentences often neglected the code-switching habit of the specific community, so that the processing difficulty might not have resulted from the change in language but from unnatural switching. This study explores the processing cost of habitual and nonhabitual code-switching. Thirty-one young adults participated in the sentence-reading task with their eye movement tracked. A two-by-two factorial design was used, with Habit (habitual/nonhabitual) and Language (unilingual/code-switched) as the factors. The main effect of Language was observed only in First Fixation Duration, suggesting that the language membership was already identified in an early processing stage. However, for habitual switches, no switching cost in overall processing effort was found, as reflected by Total Fixation Duration and Visit Counts. Our results indicate that the cognitive load was only larger when the switch occurred nonhabitually, regardless of the language membership. In light of this finding, we propose that habitual code-switching might promote the formation of bilingual collocations, or prefabs, which are then integrated into the mental lexicon of the dominant language. Despite a conscious language tag of a foreign origin, these bilingual prefabs are not processed as a language switch in the lexicon.