@inproceedings{higdon-etal-2025-predictability,
    title = "Predictability Effects of {S}panish-{E}nglish Code-Switching: A Directionality and Part of Speech Analysis",
    author = "Higdon, Josh  and
      Pagliai, Valeria  and
      Liu, Zoey",
    editor = "Chen, Xinying  and
      Wang, Yaqin",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Quantitative Syntax (QUASY, SyntaxFest 2025)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Ljubljana, Slovenia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.quasy-1.11/",
    pages = "83--89",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-293-0",
    abstract = "Research on code-switching (CS), the spontaneous alternation between two or more languages within a discourse, remains relatively new and often limited by the use of elicited production tasks, with some exceptions leveraging naturalistic corpora. This study analyses the effects of language directionality and part-of-speech (POS) tags on Spanish-English CS production between corpus modalities and speech communities. We use data from two spoken corpora: Miami Bangor Corpus (MBC; N = 261,711) and Spanish in Texas Corpus (STC; N = 416,784), as well as the written LinCE Corpus (N=278,093). Bootstrap analyses indicate that Spanish serves as the matrix language (i.e., the most used) for MBC and LinCE, while English is for STC. Logistic regression analyses show that the particle-coordinating conjunction combination was the strongest POS predictor of a CS. The results suggest that corpus modality and the speech community affect matrix language proportions and that both previously attested and unseen POS combinations modulate the production of Spanish-English CS."
}