#3949. Codeswitching within prepositional phrases: Effects of switch site and directionality

October 2026publication date
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Journal’s subject area:
Language and Linguistics;
Linguistics and Language;
Education;
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Abstract:
Codeswitching (CS) was investigated among English-Hebrew bilingual preschool children in a sentence repetition task focusing on switching at different points in prepositional phrases (PPs). English/first language (L1)-Hebrew/second language (L2), sequential bilingual children (N = 65), ages 5;5–6;5, participated. English stimulus sentences contained switches to Hebrew; Hebrew stimuli contained switches to English. Six ‘switch’ conditions were examined: a single codeswitched noun (N), a determiner–noun switch (DET+N), a codeswitched preposition (P), a preposition–determiner switch (P+DET), a switch of the entire PP (P+DET+N), and a no-switch condition. Audio recordings were transcribed and coded. Full sentence repetition was coded as correct/incorrect. The number of errors and the proportion of CS errors were computed. Accuracy was highest for the non-switched, N, and P+DET+N conditions. The findings show evidence for a hierarchy of processing costs and directionality differences, which are interpreted in terms of contrastive typological features, particularly definiteness marking in the two languages.
Keywords:
child bilingualism; Codeswitching; cognitive cost; English-Hebrew bilinguals; prepositional phrases; preschool; sentence repetition

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