A sentence to remember: Instructed language switching in sentence production

•Language switching in sentences and scrambled sentences was investigated.•Smaller switch costs were observed in sentences.•Language-specific sentences even rendered no switch costs.•This indicates a syntactic influence on language control. In the current study, we set out to investigate the influence of a sentence context on language switching. The task required German-English bilinguals to produce responses based on an alternating language sequence (L1–L1–L2–L2- …) and concepts in a specific sequential order. The concept sequence was either a sentence which was syntactically correct in both languages (language-unspecific sentence), a sentence which was correct in just one language (language-specific sentence) or a sentence which was syntactically incorrect in both languages (scrambled sentence). No switch costs were observed in language-unspecific sentences. Consequently, switch costs were smaller in those sentences than in the language-specific or scrambled sentences. The language-specific and scrambled sentence did not differ with respect to switch costs. These results demonstrate an important role of sentence context for language switch costs and were interpreted in terms of language interference and preparation processes.