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Among the many multilingual speakers of the world, code- switching (CSW) is a common linguistic phenomenon. Prior sociolinguistic work has shown that factors such as expressing group identity and solidarity, performing affective function, and reflecting shared experiences are related to CSW prevalence in multilingual speech. We build on prior studies by asking: is the expression of empathy a motivation for CSW in speech? To begin to answer this question, we examine several multilingual speech corpora representing diverse language families and ap- ply recent modeling advances in the study of empathetic mono- lingual speech. We find a generally stronger positive relation- ship of spoken CSW with the lexical correlates of empathy than with acoustic-prosodic ones, which holds across three language pairs. Our work is a first step toward establishing a motivation for CSW that has thus far mainly been studied qualitatively. 

It is well-known that speakers who entrain to one another have more successful conver- sations than those who do not. Previous re- search has shown that interlocutors entrain on linguistic features in both written and spoken monolingual domains. More recent work on code-switched communication has also shown preliminary evidence of entrainment on cer- tain aspects of code-switching (CSW). How- ever, such studies of entrainment in code- switched domains have been extremely few and restricted to human-machine textual inter- actions. Our work studies code-switched spon- taneous speech between humans, finding that (1) patterns of written and spoken entrainment in monolingual settings largely generalize to code-switched settings, and (2) some patterns of entrainment on code-switching in dialogue agent-generated text generalize to spontaneous code-switched speech. Our findings give rise to important implications for the potentially "uni- versal" nature of entrainment as a communica- tion phenomenon, and potential applications in inclusive and interactive speech technology.