Code-Switching and Syntax: A Large-Scale Experiment
This provides a large-scale, multi-language validation of a key theoretical claim in linguistics, addressing a gap in the literature for researchers studying bilingualism and syntax.
The paper tackled the problem of explaining code-switching patterns in bilingual speech by testing whether syntax alone is sufficient for prediction, and found that an automatic system using only syntactic information could distinguish between sentences in minimal pairs of code-switching as effectively as bilingual humans, with the learned patterns generalizing well to unseen language pairs.
The theoretical code-switching (CS) literature provides numerous pointwise investigations that aim to explain patterns in CS, i.e. why bilinguals switch language in certain positions in a sentence more often than in others. A resulting consensus is that CS can be explained by the syntax of the contributing languages. There is however no large-scale, multi-language, cross-phenomena experiment that tests this claim. When designing such an experiment, we need to make sure that the system that is predicting where bilinguals tend to switch has access only to syntactic information. We provide such an experiment here. Results show that syntax alone is sufficient for an automatic system to distinguish between sentences in minimal pairs of CS, to the same degree as bilingual humans. Furthermore, the learnt syntactic patterns generalise well to unseen language pairs.