Atypical and yet strongly conventionalized outcomes of language contact such as the so-called mixed languages are increasingly being reported in the literature. At present, research on mixed languages primarily relies on the study of ecologically valid data of natural speech that allow for the analysis of the constraints and social significance of the mixed languages. In contrast, experimental approaches to bilingual sentence processing are generally conducted in a laboratory environment with controlled data. I consider that the combination of the two research paradigms can be beneficial to both fields.