Recovery time during the processing of code-switches in bilinguals

The central aim of the present paper is to investigate if the recognition of code-switched lexical items causes a processing delay. Soares and Grosjean (1984) found that in a phoneme-triggered lexical decision task, bilinguals took longer to access code-switched words when they were in a bilingual mode than they did to access base language words in a monolingual mode. Using a different language pair and another task, our study shows that there is no evidence of a processing delay in code-switch recognition. The results are discussed in terms of the stimuli and the experimental paradigm used.