Spoken word recognition of code-switched words by Chinese-English bilinguals

Two experiments with Chinese-English bilinguals were conducted to examine the recognition of code-switched words in speech. In Experiment 1, listeners were asked to identify a code-switched word in a sentence on the basis of increasing fragments of the word. In Experiment 2, listeners repeated the code-switched word following a predesignated point upon hearing the sentence. Converging evidence from these experiments shows that the successful recognition of code-switched words depends on the interaction among phonological, structural, and contextual information in the recognition process. The results also indicate that Chinese-English bilinguals can recognize code-switched words with the same amount of information as required by monolingual English listeners. These results are interpreted in terms of parallel activation and interactive processes in spoken word recognition. © 1996 Academic Press, Inc.