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The fact that bilinguals aren’t forever spurting out words from the wrong language implies there’s some kind of switch.

in 2007, brain surgeons reported evidence for a language switch when their cortical prodding with an electrode caused two bilingual patients to switch languages suddenly and involuntarily.

On the other hand, there’s good evidence that languages are integrated in the bilingual mind.

bilinguals are faster at naming an object when the word for that object is similar or the same in the two languages they speak (e.g. ship/schip in English and Dutch).

even when bilinguals read sentence after sentence in their native tongue, access to words in their second language remains open, rather than switched off, thus having an effect on the way the native language is processed.

“Becoming a bilingual means one will never read the newspaper again in the same way,” they concluded. “It changes one of people’s seemingly most automatic skills, namely, reading in one’s native language.”Read more at bps-research-digest.blogspot.com