Academic Background for Switchtracking Phenomenon
Switch-tracking seems very similar to the "Dialogue Alignment" in Psycholinguistics and some other fields of Cognitive Science. For a successful conversation interlocutors need to develop similar representations. Switch-tracking, however seems an abstract conceptual domain problem, but dialogue alignment mostly investigates issues in a more concrete linguistic domain.

Here are some related publications:


  
  Pickering, M. J., &amp; Garrod, S. (2006). Alignment as the basis for
  successful communication. Research on Language and Computation,
  4(2-3), 203-228.
  Garrod, S., &amp; Pickering, M. J. (2007). Alignment in dialogue. The
  Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics, 443-451.
  Brennan, S. E., Galati, A., &amp; Kuhlen, A. K. (2010). Two minds, one
  dialog: Coordinating speaking and understanding. Psychology of
  Learning and Motivation, 53, 301-344.
  


And this one investigates bilingual alignments:


  
  Purmohammad, M. (2015). Linguistic alignment in L1–L2 dialogue.
  Language and Dialogue, 5(2), 312-333.