Title Pending

Code-switching is a conversational practice where bilinguals switch back and forth between their two languages. Although this behavior provides us with a unique data source when investigating online sentence processing, the majority of work on intrasentential code-switching has largely concentrated on identifying conditions that lead to (un)grammatical code-switch utterances. Because of that, less attention has been given to how speakers process incongruent versus congruent grammatical code-switches in real time. Here, we test the bilingual’s ability to process various word orders given the syntactic differences of their (two) languages. We conducted a picture identification task where three adult bilingual groups–Arabic/English, Korean/English, and Spanish/English–were presented with three-word expressions that varied by word order (Determiner-Modifier-Noun, Determiner-Noun-Modifier) and location of switch (No Switch, after Word 1, after Word 2, Double Switch). Our results show that all three groups elicited faster processing when the word order of an expression matched the word order preferences of the language of the noun regardless of code-switch location. Based on these results, we suggest that bilinguals can generate multiple viable word orders, even when those orders differ in canonical status across languages. However, their preferences are sensitive to the distributional preferences of conceptually-informative lexical items during online processing.