Bilingual Language Mixing: Why Do

Bilingual speakers often code-switch from one lan-guage to another, especially when both languages are used in the environment. This article explores the potential theoreti-cal explanations for this lan-guage behavior, the costs and benefits associated with lan-guage switching, and the role of language dominance in the direction of the switch. In short, code switching follows functional and grammatical principles and is a complex, rule-governed phenomenon. Although significant progress has been made in understand-ing the psycholinguistics of code switching, research is needed to examine the cognitive mechanisms underlying the bi-lingual’s ability to integrate and separate two languages during the communicative process. Keywords bilingualism; code switching; bilingual cognition Although much has been writ-ten on how bilinguals organize their two languages in memory, lit-tle is known about why bilinguals mix their two languages during the communicative process. Code switching, or language mixing, oc-curs when a word or a phrase in one language substitutes for a word or phrase in a second lan-guage (Li, 1996). For example, con-sider the sentence, “Dame una hamburguesa sin LETTUCE por fa-vor ” (”Give me a hamburger with-out LETTUCE please”). The word “lettuce ” replaces the Spanish word (”lechuga”). Why is the word “lettuce ” chosen instead of the cor-rect Spanish word? Given the speed with which spoken language occurs, and the cognitive resources required during the comprehen-sion and integration of different linguistic factors (e.g., phonologi-cal, grammatical, and semantic in-formation), one would expect bilin-guals not to switch languages, especially if retrieving a word from a second language takes more time than retrieving a word or concept from the same language. Why do bilinguals code-switch