Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Corpus studies suggest that less predictable words are more likely to be code-switched in bilingual communication, yet behavioral evidence remains limited, partially due to the difficulty of eliciting voluntary code-switches with a controlled linguistic context. In this study, we introduce a production paradigm that reliably elicits Mandarin–English code-switches and allows for precise manipulation of word predictability through numeral classifiers. Using this paradigm, we show converging evidence that both contextual predictability and baseline word frequency influence the likelihood of code-switching. This experimental paradigm provides a valuable tool for future studies of bilingual speech production.