Primed codeswitching in spontaneous bilingual dialogue

Structural priming has played an important role in research on both monolingual and bilingual language production. However, studies of bilingual priming have mainly used priming as an experimental tool, focusing on cross-language priming between single-language sentences, which is a relatively infrequent form of communication in real life. We investigated priming in spontaneous bilingual dialogue, focusing on a hallmark of bilingual language use: codeswitching. Based on quantitative analyses of a large corpus of English-Spanish language use (the Bangor Miami Corpus; Deuchar, Davies, Herring, Parafita Couto, & Carter, 2014), we found that key discoveries from the structural priming literature also apply to bilinguals' codeswitching behavior, in terms of both the tendency to codeswitch and the grammatical frame of codeswitched utterances. Our results provide novel insights into the different levels and modes of speech at which priming mechanisms are at work, and they illuminate the differences and commonalities between monolingual and bilingual language production.