Testing the Triggering Hypothesis: Effect of Cognate Status on Code-Switching and Disfluencies

Abstract

“Triggered switching” is the theory that code-switching happens more often with words connected to both languages, such as cognates. Corpus analyses have supported this theory; however, they do not allow testing for directional causality. Here, we test the triggering hypothesis through a picture-naming task, and examine whether cognates trigger code-switches, as well as more subtle interference effects resulting in disfluencies. Forty English-Spanish bilinguals completed a picture-cued sentence production task in three conditions: English-only, Spanish-only, and mixed. Half of the pictures represented Spanish-English cognates. Unsurprisingly, participants were more likely to code-switch when asked to use both their languages compared to only their dominant or non-dominant language. However, participants were not more likely to switch languages for cognate than for non-cognate trials. Participants tended to be more fluent on cognate trials in the dominant and the non-dominant condition, and on non-cognate trials in the mixed-language condition, although these effects were not significant. These findings suggest that both language context and cognate status are important to consider when testing both overt switches and disfluencies in bilingual speech production.